THIS NADINE GORDIMER

this nadine gordimer knows what a novel is. knows what structure is. knows what meaning to chase down, to capture, knows the shape of the trap that will snare it.

one reads The Pickup thinking it like a Y; two people from different places brought accidentally together, who go on living as one complicated strand made of two, the stem of the Y. but it is not a Y. it is an X. and the author has known it and known where it goes and what she is after nailing to the earth, to the page, and she does nail it, artfully, carefully, letting out just enough at every turn, to cause that wonderful novelistic thing —— the inevitable surprise.

you think you know, even for quite a time, until coming up from underneath there is emerging another knowing, the right one this time, to surprise you. this woman born of, emerging from, a cold materialistic world of privilege, which values privilege over justice, who seeks the enveloping warmth of family. this man born of family, emerging from a stifling, formal, inflexible set of meanings and imperatives that yet better values human warmth and care, though in poverty, who seeks the expanding potential of success unbridled, of privilege, security, worldliness, even wealth — everything he sees embodied in her. everything that she wishes to abandon in favor of the family he seeks to abandon — how can it be anything but a perfect X?

first with her friends at the L A café and then with his relatives in africa, she has sought the enclosing warmth of a family she has never known. he has sought a kind of privilege he has heard of but never known. they have been forced by the author to confront one another, and to confront the ideas they each represent. how inevitable. how perfect.

like life in a crystal glass, we get to see it clearly, in the clarity of the novelist's singular unswerving vision.

if life were as visible as this we would never need novels.