Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?

Nadine Gordimer’s new novel, “The Pickup,” presents the reader with a puzzle. This dry, precise book piercingly examines some of the desperate power inequities between haves and have-nots created by the new globalism (a topic that such disparate writers as John Berger, John Le Carre and Gloria Emerson are also exploring through fiction). “The Pickup” is as spare, elliptical and devoid of psychological explication as a Raymond Carver story, but Gordimer is using the barrenness of personal relationships to explore large and urgent questions. Still, “The Pickup” is a love story, too--albeit one that raises the possibility that romantic love itself may be a privilege of the privileged. And as a love story, though it is never less than interesting, it is never remotely believable. Oddly, it is the teller--Gordimer’s tersely perceptive,omniscient narrator--who isto be trusted here, far morethan the tale.

“The Pickup” opens in a bustling, cosmopolitan South African city--a city of hip cafes, traffic jams, peasants-turned-beggars and “prostitutes from Congo and Senegal [who] sat at tables with the confidence of beauty queens.” It is a city in which various worlds fuse (or perhaps collide), and where Julie Summers and Ibrahim ibn Musa (known as Abdu) accidentally meet when Julie’s car breaks down.

Both are in their late 20s, but aside from a generation, they share almost nothing. Julie is a white and affluent (so affluent that she huffily rejects her father’s money); Abdu is an Arab immigrant who works as a garage mechanic. Julie is part of the “new” South Africa; she and her multiracial, quasi-bohemian circle of friends pride themselves on having rejected “the ways of the past, their families, whether these are black ones still living in the old ghettoes or white ones in The Suburbs,” and on recognizing no hierarchies based on race or class or nation. Abdu is a member of the new world too, though somewhat less defiantly: The holder of a degree in economics from a university “nobody’s heard of,” he subsists in South Africa’s underground economy, and his presence in the country is illegal.

Despite the disdain of Julie and her friends, the world does recognize--indeed, some would say is based upon--hierarchies of race and class and nation. And Gordimer is an absolute master at delineating how these hierarchies play themselves out, not theoretically but in the smallest details of everyday human relations. Julie and Abdu’s first encounters are defined by these differences, and her embarrassed, well-meaning guilt--itself a kind of luxury--is counterposed to his stoicism. Gordimer sets a painfully awkward scene as Julie, having invited Abdu out for a coffee, asks him about himself:

“It was the wrong thing--there! She’d done it, it came out god-awful as Showing Interest, and she thought she heard him take a breath in order to deal with it, with her; but he only put out his hand for the sugar-bowl, she hastened to hand it to him.... He would keep silent if he wanted to, he could speak if he wished, it wasn’t up to her.”

Julie and Abdu begin a love affair; and though her friends regard Abdu as a passing fancy--a form of erotic slumming--for Julie their relationship is the real thing, indeed the realest thing she has ever known in her pampered if not entirely unadventurous life. Julie plunges in, but Abdu meets her impetuosity (another privilege, Gordimer suggests) with a tenacious caution: Life has taught him the wisdom of resistance, “the response of refusal.” And is there any place--other than so joyously in bed--for these two to truly meet? Julie rails against Abdu’s exploitative boss, but Abdu merely remarks, “What would I do without him.” Julie loathes her businessman father and his wealthy friends; Abdu admires them as “people doing well with their life....Moving on always. Clever....Making business. That’s not bad, that is the world. Progress.” Julie glides through life with the authority of one born to choices; Abdu patiently waits in lines as a supplicant. Julie abandons herself in lovemaking; Abdu is ever-conscious of sex as the servicing of others. Finally, it comes to this: Julie is interested in connection, while Abdu is interested in survival--a chasm that romance cannot bridge.

And when, perhaps inevitably, Abdu receives his deportation letter--the type of terrifyingly official document Julie has never received and will never receive--she cannot accurately read it, though Abdu certainly can. Gordimer observes: “He knows the form, the content, the phraseology; it is the form of the world’s communication with him. She looks for loopholes, for double meanings that might be deciphered to advantage, that he knows are all stopped up, are all unambiguous. Out. Get out. Out.” The world is divided, “The Pickup” suggests, not just between rich and poor but perhaps even more between those few--white, properly educated, holders of the right passports--who are welcome almost everywhere in it and the millions of others whom nobody really wants. Open borders are open only to the privileged, though it is the unprivileged who tend to be most aware of this.

Abdu’s unnamed country is, by his account, a hopelessly grim place. It is a country so poor that it has “no capitalist economy, no socialist economy. Nothing.” It is a “run-down depraved strip of a country Europeans didn’t even want to hold on to any longer,” a country where women in black veils spend their lives serving men, where the acquisition of a cell phone and a TV is considered the new nirvana, where “everyone is waiting for something that may come sometime--a return from the oil fields, the settlement of an ancient debt, a coup whose generals will not stuff their own pockets--or never.” The sole purpose of Abdu’s life is to escape this place. But when he is forced to leave South Africa, Julie insists on accompanying him back to his bleak, impoverished village--a plan to which Abdu reluctantly agrees but that, on some level, not only mystifies but also horrifies him. Back home, Abdu immediately resumes his plans for another emigration. But Julie’s increasing immersion in his large if not quite welcoming family, in the village and in the mysteries of the desert lead her to make another, far more surprising decision.

The story of a woman--even a modern woman--who gives up her life for romantic love (and then gives up romantic love for something else again) is not new, and there is nothing inherently implausible in it. This may be particularly true when the life she abandons is one she has found essentially empty, which is true of Julie Summers. The problem with “The Pickup” is not that the events it depicts could not (or should not) happen but that Gordimer does not convince us that they are happening. We see the affair (which becomes a marriage) between Julie and Abdu entirely from the outside; there is simply not enough between them (or, at least, Gordimer does not reveal what there is between them) for us to understand how the relationship could be life-changing. Gordimer’s cool objectivity, which works so well in depicting the inequality of social relations, backfires when it comes to the emotional ties at the core of “The Pickup.” It’s not sentimentality we miss; indeed, “The Pickup’s” lack of misty romanticism is refreshingly bracing. But we do need to know that these two people have forged a connection so strong it will take one of them--indeed, force one of them--to radically unexpected places, not only geographical but emotional too. Gordimer never offers us that senseof recognition, never allows us to say, Yes, this is just the way it would be.