Tales of Privacy and Politics

By Paul Gray

SOMETHING OUT THERE by Nadine Gordimer; Viking; 203 pages; $15.95

In eight novels and eight previous collections of short fiction, South African Author Nadine Gordimer, 60, has emerged as the most influential home-grown critic of her country's repressive racial policies. But that reputation tends to blur some of the finer distinctions of her art. She is not really a polemicist. The portraits of her native land shade softly into irony and indirection; an overriding injustice must be deduced from small, vividly realized details. Her most important contribution to contemporary letters is not a moral message but the brilliant and memorable ways she has found to deliver it.

Nor is Gordimer a one-subject writer. Of the title novella and nine stories that make up Something Out There, four have nothing to do with apartheid or South Africa. Letter from His Father is a jeu d'esprit altogether outside the land of the living. From beyond the grave, Hermann Kafka answers a famous message left by his son Franz: "You wrote me a letter you never sent. It wasn't for me--it was for the whole world to read. (You and your instructions that everything should be burned. Hah!)" The old man is not content simply to refute the younger Kafka's charges. He turns self-defense into the art of attack: "And you sitting there at meals always with a pale, miserable, glum face, not a word to say for yourself, picking at your food...You haven't forgotten that I used to hold up the newspaper so as not to have to see that. You bear a grudge. You've told everybody. But you don't think about what there was in a father's heart. From the beginning. I had to hide it behind a newspaper--anything. For your sake." Readers who know nothing about the Kafkas will still have no trouble catching this story's amusing and poignant drift: rare are the parents who can recognize themselves in their children's eyes.

Three stories brush against the private vagaries of love. In Sins of the Third Age, a couple eagerly plan their retirement to a farm in Italy. Then the husband announces, "I've met somebody." The wife is stunned but ultimately agrees to live out their remaining years together, just as they had always expected. She finds the infidelity hard to bear, but not as shattering as her husband's lethargic confession that he has renounced his lover. In Rags and Bones, a woman buys an old tin chest at a junk shop and discovers within it a cache of more than 300 love letters. She spends a day reading them, vicariously participating in a passion that her own fashionable life holds at bay. In Terminal, a woman with cancer begs her husband not to interfere if she decides to commit suicide. But an agonizing dilemma then arises: How should he love her--by letting her die, or by refusing to abet their separation?

Such moral complexities do not disappear when Gordimer addresses, directly or by analogy, the problems of South Africa. At the Rendezvous of Victory shows the aftermath of a successful black revolution in an unnamed land. Broad social justice has unquestionably triumphed, but the blessings are bestowed unevenly. The new regime finds itself increasingly embarrassed by Sinclair ("General Giant") Zwedu, the military hero of the war for freedom. The blunt soldier does not mix easily in the brave new world of international alliances and monetary congresses. His former colleagues shunt Zwedu toward oblivion, using the lure of well-heeled debauchery. In A City of the Dead, a City of the Living, a black couple in Soweto take in a visitor who may have been involved in the terrorist bombing of a police station. He and the husband talk politics; the wife, increasingly unsettled for reasons of her own, reports the guest to the white authorities.

Something Out There covers the broad swath of Johannesburg suburbs, where two strange things are happening at the same time. One of them makes the headlines. A mysterious creature seems to be roaming over manicured lawns. House pets have been found mauled or killed, swimming pools disturbed by unexplained rustling in surrounding trees. The more serious menace goes unrecognized and unheralded. A seemingly harmless white couple rent a house and are secretly joined there by two black men in a plot to blow up a nearby power station.

These two threads of plot are linked by the common element of fear. Whites are made edgy by the unidentified invader in ways that they cannot or will not understand: "All the residents of the suburbs wanted was for the animal to be confined in its appropriate place, that's all, zoo or even circus. They were prepared to pay for this to be done." Gordimer rarely allows herself passages of such clear and cutting satire. Whites in South Africa have already paid, to keep the majority of blacks in an "appropriate" place, a price yet to be reckoned.

The frustrated novelist in Manhattan, contemplating his third mid-life crisis; the divorcee in Iowa City, typing out the beastly habits of her ex-husband; such writers might well envy the panoramic scene that Nadine Gordimer inherited as a birthright. The raw material is, to be sure, stupendous: an outlaw nation on a seething, exotic continent, with a social system based on a fiction of magnificent folly. Given such stories, what author could fail? Gordimer has been fortunate in her subject, but she continues to magnify this gift, to transform what is happening into fiction not to be forgotten. --By Paul Gray

EXERPTS

"A chimpanzee, some insist. A large monkey, say others...

Every household in the fine suburb had several black servants--trusted cooks who were allowed to invite their grandchildren to spend their holidays in the backyard...a shifting population of pretty young housemaids whose long red nails and pertness not only asserted the indignity of being undiscovered or out-of-work fashion models but kept hoisted a cocky guerrilla pride against servitude to whites: there are many forms of resistance not recognized in orthodox revolutionary strategy."