FICTION: POLITICAL NOVEL
No Time Like the Present by Nadine Gordimer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Novels by elderly writers tend to fall into two categories: wispy, vague and nostalgic, or crabbed and dyspeptic. Novel-writing is a demanding, even draining activity, and the vast majority of good novels are written by men and women between the ages of 30 and 60, people in their mental and physical prime who still know something of the world as it is. There are exceptions, of course: Saul Bellow wrote the marvelous “Ravelstein” when he was in his 80s. And the precocious F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote “The Great Gatsby” in his 20s.
Nadine Gordimer will be 87 this year. Her latest novel, “No Time Like the Present,” doesn’t appear, at first glance, to be the work of an elderly writer. Rather than fulminating about the decline of civilization, or obsessing about the ghosts that haunt her memory, Gordimer deals with the present, or the near-present: post- apartheid, post-Mandela South Africa from the late 1990s to now. The cast of characters is impressively large, from impoverished residents of Bantustans to university professors to gay playwrights to the alarming current president of South Africa, Jacob Zuma.
Most of impressive of all, “No Time Like the Present” seems hardly concerned at all with death or mortality. “No time like the present” is the precept of a Methodist elder and headmaster who is the father of Jabulile, one of the two main characters. It is a call to action, to activism, to change the way things are.
Jabulile, a black South African lawyer, is married to Steve, a white professor of chemistry. They are both veterans of the Struggle, the clandestine effort to rid the country of apartheid. Steve, who before the dismantling of apartheid used his chemistry knowledge to make bombs, secures a professorship at the university. Jabulile uses her logistical talents at the Poverty Center to help the indigent.
In a country in which the most obvious evils have seemingly been defeated, the battle lines are no longer clear. Steve and Jabu take up the cause of gay South Africans struggling against the country’s macho culture. Jabu argues with her father about President Zuma, who manages not just to get himself accused of corruption but put on trial for rape.
For old lefties like Steve and Jabu, the slogan “The Personal Is Political” means an endless self-policing. Should they evict squatters on their street because their presence is bringing down property values? Should Jabu wear traditional African dress or a pantsuit to work? Should they allow their son to attend a traditional all-male prep school and reinforce the patriarchy? Should they take a vacation or abandon the effort to better their crumbling country and move to Australia? Most of this demands to be played for comedy, but is rendered in deadly earnest.
Gordimer, who was one of the key liberal voices in the struggle against apartheid and a friend to Nelson Mandela, believes that literature exists to prick consciences, to change minds, to bear witness. This has been the goal of activist literature since “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” helped bring the Civil War to a head. Harriet Beecher Stowe understood that there is nothing to get people exercised about injustice like good, old-fashioned melodrama.
There is no melodrama in “No Time Like the Present”; there is really no drama, either, just a series of small personal/political crises. The novel seems to have been written in great haste, without correction or revision. Gordimer writes an artless, jargon-ridden, run-on prose, full of political pamphlet language:
Hers, representing real advancement of what was better than ambition: fulfillment of her place in that basis of what’s called the New Dispensation, the law; his without the sense of common action in an alternative to the old confines of education, her alternative to the defence of justice confined to those who can afford legal representation.
A good editor would have untangled the syntax, strengthened the rhythm, eliminated the unintentional rhymes. But Gordimer, whose urgent, charmless style seems to reflect the jemenfoutisme of the elderly, is probably editor-proof.
“I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live,” said George Bernard Shaw, another indefatigable writer and progressive moral giant.
Shaw’s credo is no doubt Gordimer’s. It is a wonderful precept to live by, but it doesn’t always produce good art.
