The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer

If we don't get out of here soon she won't stand it much longer, this dusty hell of my place. She'll go back there. The big trees round her cottage. The grass a black man came to cut. Her kind; that Cafe. The beautiful terrace for lunch on Sunday. Permanent Residence: so many applications, so many ways, any kind of way, tried, for that status anywhere. Anywhere but here. If she had been one of the ways snatched at when he gave his smile in response to her attraction to him that day in the garage (or was it only on the street), if she had failed him, failed the influence he had counted on through her secure status of birth, whiteness, family position, money, if it didn't achieve any right for his Permanent Residence in her country--she had come (didn't she say it) all the way with him; the way of refusal, failure, buried back here in the cursed village in the sand, his home, that claimed him. Love. He had to believe in it, existing in her.

Julie Summers is a white South African, the daughter of a rich businessman who rejects her parentage, at least symbolically, by hanging out in a cafe with a group of mixed-race bohemians. One day, when her car breaks down in the middle of the street, she takes it to a garage, where an Arab man going by Abdu fixes it for her. Julie, intrigued by the handsome mechanic, finds ways to keep Abdu in her company, and eventually this relationship becomes physical, romantic. Her friends are tolerant of her "pickup," if distantly amused by it. It's less funny to her father, though his circle, too, is tolerant of Abdu in their way: they don't need to be dismissive or defensive when it's clear to everyone that Julie and Abdu do not belong together, their worlds do not overlap, and eventually their relationship will founder against this fact and disintegrate. When Abdu--real name Ibrahim--is tracked down at last by the immigration authorities and expelled, Julie insists on traveling with him to his unnamed home country.

Before leaving, Julie and Abdu-Ibrahim visit with Hamilton Motsamai, the brilliant black lawyer from Gordimer's novel The House Gun, and it seems as if The Pickup will be, like that other novel, a book about the ways South Africa's racial fault lines are exposed by the political process, only with immigrant experiences added to the familiar black-white divide. But The Pickup actually reminded me most of July's People, another Gordimer novel about upper-class whites cast into an unfamiliar and disorienting cultural universe. Most of the book takes place not in South Africa but the unnamed Arab country of Ibrahim's birth, as Julie struggles to fit into his wary family, teaching English to members of the small desert village Ibrahim has struggled all his life to escape.

Honestly, I find this ability of Gordimer's incredible. What other white writer can write so empathetically and imaginatively about what it would be like for white people to live under the kind of circumstances that people of color--black Africans in July's People and Arab immigrants in The Pickup--have endured so long? There's no hedging, no tone-deafness, no heavy-handed clash of cultures. July's People ends with an image of tremendous ambiguity, as the white housewife who has been hiding in her former servant's traditional village heads to the sound of an incoming helicopter, not knowing if it holds her salvation or certain death. But The Pickup--spoiler alert--ends with Julie refusing to emigrate with Ibrahim to the USA, choosing to stay with his family. Who else could imagine the circumstances in which a white woman chooses to stay with a traditional Muslim family, rather than, as Ibrahim constantly expects, returning to the life of racial privilege available to her? Or who else could imagine it so convincingly? It's hard for me to describe it without making it seem congratulatory--great job, white lady!--but to make such a choice really seem true, both character and author really do have to reject everything that is familiar and safe.

Among other things, The Pickup reveals the difficult and complex demands the world places on "third world" emigrants. What Julie experiences as a kind of personal reformation, Ibrahim experiences as a familiar but tedious period of waiting, of suspension: the endless paperwork, the fruitless interviews at consulate after consulate, the greasing of palms, not even being able to choose which country one would wish to emigrate to, even before the dreary work of finding work and housing begins. What Ibrahim learns is that "the world," whatever that might be, belongs to others. Julie is "not for him," in the sense that she is made for someone else, belonging to somewhere else, but when the two make love, they conceive of it as a different kind of country, one to which they both belong. Amazingly, The Pickup was published in September of 2001, which means that things have only gotten worse since then. There are more refugees, more emigrants, and fewer places for them. But unlike Gordimer's apartheid-era novels, which express a kind of knowledgeable pessimism about race relations in South Africa, Julie's final choice in The Pickup seems, to me, to hold a grain of optimism.