|
|
Executive Times |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
2006 Book Reviews |
|||
|
|
Get a
Life by Nadine Gordimer |
|||
|
Rating: |
*** |
|||
|
|
(Recommended) |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
Contamination
Nobel winner Nadine Gordimer
has always demanded much of her readers. In her latest novel, Get a
Life, she uses protagonist Paul Bannerman, a 35 year old ecologist whose
cancer treatment requires his isolation because of radioactivity, to stand in
for all of society in our collective illnesses, isolations, and contradictions.
The creation of the illusion of safety through containment provides an
interesting motif during global struggles with terrorism. Readers will work
hard to try to piece together when the narrator is inside Paul’s mind and
whose relationship is being examined, as Paul recovers at his parent’s home. Paul’s
illness gives him time to reflect on his relationship with his wife, Berenice, whose career is to do advertising work for the
same developers Paul opposes. Here’s an excerpt, pp. 40-47: It is Agency style that
clients at once address even senior personnel by the first name; the unspoken
premise is that the client and the professional who is designing promotion of
what the client wants to sell are in partnership rather than the calculated
relation of hire and pay. Berenice: this one has a
manner of treating the client as an equal in the flair, the style of campaign
she is planning, no matter how obvious it is that the client has no such
faculties of his or her own. This ‘Berenice’
somehow conveys assurance that the campaign is an inside job, she’s part of
the client’s company advancing itself. Her smart asides on public taste, and
endearing swift movements indicting her own, her small pauses, notation in
the brand jingle of advertising-agency-client dialogue, to mark sensitive
understanding when the client wavers a doubt. . . All these that had come to
her spontaneously now seemed a professional technique. It could be produced
while the one to whom her real responses should be directed was shut away,
not only in some physical place, but from any part in the daily, nightly
existence of herself and the child. The child: as if the child and the life
that he represented were all that there had been in the complex one of a man
and a woman? Responses cut and dangling. How could it take an illness to do
this? That’s all, just an illness. She had not needed, while jesting or
expertly elaborating on serious matters appealing to the shrewdness of
clients, to think of him when he was off in his wilderness, passionate as he
was to be there; she somehow could not, in need now, summon ability to think
of him as he was in the room made a confinement in the house of occasional
family gatherings. Even his voice on the telephone, what did it convey of
where he was, what he was. Even the afternoon visits in that other wilderness
between them, his childhood garden, where the tension in him at the pain of
her being there and not there for him made her feel she was in control of
another’s mind, not herself, in another time. She hears herself
convincing sceptical clients with enthusiastic
voice, fan-spread hands winking magenta fingernails, bracelets sliding back
on rather beautiful forearms, of the intelligence of her plan of action.
From the most dourly resistant of them she drew admiration to be read in the
relaxation of face muscles although they continued to let their sidekicks do
the questioning. In-house, between consultations with clients, there was the
usual bantering and exchange of private views on their idiosyncrasies—Agency
gossip with colleagues, several of whom were black, now, in the Agency’s
policy of self-interest showing conformation to Affirmative Action (some
clients came from new black-owned companies), young women indistinguishable
in their styles of dress and vocational jargon, except for the colour of their skin and elaborate arrangements of their
hair. Only a select few of her colleagues knew the details of what had
happened to that rather dishy man of hers who was
always off in the bush saving the planet. Disaster is private, in its way,
as love is. Other people will be pruriently curious
(love-matters) or trivialise with their syrup of
sympathy (matters of disaster). Her professional persona,
carrying on for her. That had to be. She drank champagne someone brought in
to celebrate the triumphant contract, quipped and laughed in shared pride.
She went out often to dinner with special friends among the colleagues,
usually white, as had been before the Affirmative Action ones had
arrived—those seemed to have better things to do with their leisure. At
dinner, as always, everyone ‘talked shop’ and it was quite usual for someone
to come without their other-occupied lover or spouse. Mutual friends, Paul’s
and hers—difficult to explain to them, no offence meant— she became inclined
to avoid. They wanted to talk about him, were concerned to know how she
really felt, sought her acceptance of their support for that which was not
clear—was it because her husband and their dear friend was likely sentenced
to death, or was it for the unimaginable state of her isolation from him,
parting while he was still alive, somewhere. Should they call him? Could she
take books, documentaries and comedies they’d recorded, letters, to him? If
she did deliver whatever they remembered to give her, they did not receive
any response to let them know that their gifts of friendship and thought for
him meant anything. Perhaps he was too weak to respond, though they’d been
given to understand he was recuperating while still an Untouchable—
radiation coming from his body. Or was it that the state of being taboo to
others produced exactly the complementary within the isolated one: ability to
communicate stifled. Most unfortunate it was
decided that the grandparents with whom little Nickie
got along so happily, perhaps should have no contact with him, though the
doctors had been vague about whether secondhand proximity to emanation was
any danger; Lyndsay went to Chambers and Adrian
mixed with fel1ow board members. Yet certainly a wise precaution, no matter
how remote the shaft of invisible light might be, for die grandmother not to
be in the proximity of the child since she was the one who touched what had
been against the lit-up body, clothes, sheets, the utensils that came from
contact with lips and tongue. Lyndsay and Adrian
tactfully left the couple alone in the garden if they happened to be home
when Benni visited. But they felt that Paul’s wife
and themselves must have some private meaning for one
another and this should find expression in some gesture beyond telephone
exchanges. In association between Adrian and Benni,
the danger would seem so remote a risk; Paul was no longer too weak to bath
alone, his father did not have to expose himself by helping him. This young woman his son
had chosen. The restaurant was not one
of those where family celebrations were held because they were familiar to
the parents-good food and wine list to be counted on. It was in a suburb
where white civil servants, mainly Afrikaners, had lived neatly around their
Apostolic and Dutch Reformed churches, and had been deserted by them when
after their regime had been defeated, black people had the right to move in
as neighbours. Then it had become a place where all
that had been clandestine, the mixing of blacks and whites, not necessarily
the political activists who had won that freedom, was open. People in
television, the theatre, advertising, journalists, and all the hangers-on of
the arts and crafts, made it fashionable among themselves. An alternative to
corporate chic, which they couldn’t have afforded anyway. And in addition to
rap and jazz bars and restaurants which gays or blacks favoured
like clubs, vegetarians could find dishes to conform to different versions of
their faith, mixed-race lovers were not something exotic confined to the new
black upper class and their white partners patronising
elegant enclaves of the old white rich. And there was something the corporate
rich hadn’t thought of as part of night life, a bookshop that stayed open very
late. Yes of course, this was one
of the restaurants she’d been to customarily, with Agency pals and sometimes
with Paul. The quarter was lively, scents of herb shops, marijuana, spicy
cooking drifted into the streets along with wafts of music. Paul had found
treasures of old hooks, scuffed and rat-nibbled early accounts of
pre-white-settled terrain, river courses, and information on pre-industrial
climate, in the bookshop’s secondhand bins. His father had chosen what
he thought would be her kind of place. She wanted to respond to this wish to
please, to divert—and—-—was it—console both the father and herself by
breaking bread, drinking wine in a covenant of those invisible liens that
must exist, unthought-of, unrecognised in the
Christmas pecks on the cheek, between the one who generated, from his body,
the son, and the one who receives the son in hers. Presence of death standing
by makes a sacrament of tenuous relationships. They talked quite animatedly.
He smilingly half-confessed his choice of the restaurant. —Thank you for the
pretext that’s brought us here! Never tried Melville before. I don’t know
about Lyn, she might have, with some young legal colleague. I think she’d
like it anyway, we must come and have a meal. What
good and imaginative food.— He was interested in the
ethics of advertising, how did the industry expect to make up, for instance,
for the loss of exposure it could offer now that beer promotion for the huge
sports-events market was banned by the government: this must be a headache
for the agencies? He was not afraid, either, of bringing up matters which
assumed, as present, opinions of the quarantined. What kind of school did
she and his son think of for their son, only a baby still, but he supposes a
changed country both made a ‘normal’ education possible as it never was under
segregation when Paul was a child, and raised new questions of choice,
nevertheless. No segregation, black and white; but boys’ school or co-ed? The pleasant warmth of
people her own age and kind around her, the food and wine to her taste; it
was the element lapping about someone other than herself, as she talked, she
contributed to an exchange with the well-informed and attentive man opposite
her—the son closely resembled the mother, this man could be taken without any
other recognition, for himself, and whatever hidden self might be. She heard
her own voice speak, a professional facility. She ate without distinguishing
one flavour or consistency from another. The wine
stirred someone else’s blood, not hers. She, so naturally sociable, called to
in greeting of lifted glasses from other tables, where fellow habitués
happened to be, endured in desperation—surrounded by—the alien presence that
was other people. In her call next morning
she was telling the son what a good time she had. Why? So that he wouldn’t
worry about her. So that he wouldn’t be saddened by the thought that she
could enjoy herself without him? Perhaps forever. Her own behaviour
most of the time is an enigma to her. Had she ever found the atmosphere in
that place her native element; yet this must have been evident in her, else
why would a man like his father—no, Paul. Often silent, when
they were there partying with her colleagues? Just thoughtfully listening or,
she would think, his head full of those vast
contradictory factors in his beloved wilderness just left. Paul with her and
not present. Cosmic problems. Another ‘why’; why must her man take on the
survival of the whole bloody world, and now himself a threatened species. Readers of prior Gordimer
novels have come to learn about Steve Hopkins,
January 25, 2006 |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
Go to Executive Times
Archives |
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the February 2006
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Get
a Life.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|||
