Apprehension moves like a drug through the arteries of Nadine Gordimer’s astringent new novel, “Get a Life.” As the tale begins, 35-year-old South African ecologist Paul Bannerman is recovering from thyroid cancer surgery. Thanks to radioactive iodine treatment, he must endure a period of quarantine from his wife and son. Paul has become, as Gordimer aptly puts it, his own Chernobyl.
Paul’s illness is just one of the many lurking blights that come to fruition in “Get a Life.” Just as he begins to recover, a long-ago affair resurfaces within the marriage of Paul’s parents and becomes aggressively malignant. Meanwhile, as he reacquaints himself with the tangible world, Paul realizes his wife – a high-powered ad executive – might want another child. The way forward is to grow – always.
Cancer then is an apt metaphor, because “Get a Life” is a meditation on the dangers of self-interest, the frisson of anxiety that ripples through individuals (and society) when they have been forced to cut back on what they can claim as theirs – and what happens when they choose to keep growing anyway, to get more.
While Paul recuperates, his colleagues keep their eyes on an Australian multinational that is trying to plant a mining operation on African soil. After apartheid, the abuse of land rights becomes a sneaky way for an economic exploitation to takes its place.
Observing how this cause energizes him, Paul’s wife, Benni, suddenly realizes that, as an advertising executive whose clients favor development, she technically is the enemy.
As this setup reveals, “Get a Life” can feel a little schematic, and Gordimer seems to worry her readers will forget to ask the questions the action so clearly prompts of them. Perhaps that is why she has littered the novel with thematic billboards. “What is ‘rid of’ in terms of any pollution,” she wonders at the end of one section, “it’s not only what is cast into the sea that comes back to foul another shore, no matter whose it is.”
Remarkably, the novel can withstand these eyesores standing on its ground because Gordimer is so good where it counts – which is in bringing characters to life.
Sparely, with the gritty empiricism that has made her books such bracing reads, she assembles Paul and his father and his mother out of the things that they believe, and the things they secretly fear.
Although Gordimer narrates in a close third person, each character exists in a slightly different prose register – Paul’s early recuperation period being the most dramatic and strange. Gordimer slices up her normally fluid language into sentence fragments and knotty inversions that beautifully re-create the sense of a man who has been handed a life sentence, only to have it swiftly removed. “Only out there, the garden, could the wilderness be gained,” Paul thinks, while still sick. “(L)ying on the grass the many hours not tallied with a stick tracing in the sand. The days.”
What happens when we have polluted our Eden and replaced it with the jingoistic belief in self-actualization above all else? Is there any going back? At first whiff, “Get a Life” feels an odd title for this novel.
But as the action progresses, and Gordimer masterfully grinds her yarn to a quivering conclusion, no answers have been provided, and the moniker she has given this provocative book seems perfect.
John Freeman lives in New York.
“Get a Life”
By Nadine Gordimer
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 187 pages, $20
