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The Pickup
Nadine Gordimer

Reviewed by Mary Fitzgerald

Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer first acquired fame in her native South Africa as an outspoken critic of apartheid. But as the times have changed, her focus has shifted.
The Pickup is a bittersweet tale of star-crossed lovers of the global age, where power hierarchies still exist, but under different guises.

Julie Summers is a disaffected daughter of a wealthy businessman whose chance encounter with a young car mechanic jolts her out of her aimless existence. As an illegal immigrant, he belongs to the post-apartheid underclass. As their love blossoms, he is served with a deportation notice.

Being from a well-connected family, Julie naively assumes that ‘strings can be pulled’, that something can be ‘arranged’. But their futile efforts become a lesson in South Africa’s new system of exclusion. Ensconced in his “corporate palazzo”, the black lawyer has no sympathy – he was once himself a victim of segregation. But he is one them now. Julie’s father would never help an “illegal alien from a backward country” (particularly one who is sleeping with his daughter).
Even her supposedly “liberal” friends expect her to “get over it” and choose “one of her own”. South Africa, it seems, is still populated by the selectively tolerant.

Reading this story is an intensely disorienting experience. There are frequent shifts in perspective, tense and location, and it is often unclear what is actually being said, rather than just thought or implied. But these ambiguities and omissions are deliberate - they point to the gaps in our own understanding of the world. Like Julie and Abdu, we undergo a process of displacement.

Abdu (whose real name we do not discover until much later) is many things at once - a “grease monkey”, an “illegal alien”, the “oriental prince”, the “someone that Julie produced”. Because his country is never named, we are unable to form our own preconceived notions about him. Instead we are reminded that “everyone who sees a face sees a different face”.

In some sense, then, Gordimer has not strayed too far from where she first started in her career. She is still asking questions about identity, belonging and the right to seek a better life. But now, more than ever before, our world is transient and unstable, and love can be stripped of all certainties outside of itself.

This is a novel of swift power and concision, a compelling, unsettling and thought-provoking read.