The Pickup
by Nadine Gordimer
(Farrar, Strauss and Giroux) $24

Immigrants! They're everywhere. They are cleaning your streets and your malls, they are dry-cleaning your clothes and cleaning your toilets. They are growing your food, driving your cabs, taking over your businesses, buying your neighbors' homes. They are everywhere. And, you may wonder, who exactly are these people? Where on Earth have they come from, and under what circumstance, be it choice or desperation, have they come to land in your next-door apartment, or in the very job you hoped for? Immigrants in a new country resemble the moon. An aspect of them becomes slowly visible as they assimilate the language, the culture of their new home; their other story remains dark, far away, invisible to the naked eye.

Nadine Gordimer's new book, The Pickup, turns an incisive eye on the complex layers of belonging and unbelonging that make up the immigrant experience. Gordimer, a white, South African, Nobel Prize-winning author, has always been concerned with how differences, racial and economic, both keep us apart and bind us together. Her prolific body of work--from the early years of apartheid to the present--has laid bare the disparities of privilege that divide us, as well as the everyday nuances of the heart and mind that make us human.

More than any other writer in the latter half of the 20th century, Gordimer has consistently given voice, with extraordinary empathy, to those unable to speak, making visible those who were invisible. Also, Gordimer's writing is some of the best out there. Her sensitive, expert prose is as mercilessly true and deft as a leopard. It stalks the inflections of intimacy with unnerving precision, and elaborates the broader themes of privilege and poverty, of visibility and invisibility, and of the remarkable human ability to overcome and finally embrace difference.

As a post-apartheid novel, The Pickup concerns the plight of illegal immigrants who still remain disenfranchised non-citizens in so many parts of the world. Gordimer's characters move from the specificity of South Africa's bitter history of prejudice to a broader exploration of dispossession in a multinational, economically divided world.

She reveals the shifting selves of her characters as they cross borders and remake themselves in new contexts. If what we see is just one broken-English side of the immigrant story, Gordimer's novel gives us transparency. In this novel we see one easy side, then the other.

The novel's central character is Julie, a young white liberal who has rejected her wealthy family for a group of dressed-down progressives. Julie falls in love with an Arab illegal, Abdu. She "picks him up" casually, as one picks up a language or a disease, fascinated by his mysterious, rootless life. At first, it is Julie who is drawn as a fully developed character; we see her with all her foibles, her liberal philosophies, which are shadowed by the fact of her privilege, the stamp of her white skin, the agency of her rich father.

Abdu is "a cut-out from a background that she surely imagines only wrongly." He is the alien, legally invisible, and only discernible to her through their increasing intimacy. When his deportation papers come, Julie takes what she perceives as a risk (or is it an adventure?): She marries Abdu and returns with him to his poverty-stricken desert homeland.

Here, the tables turn. Julie "has no sense of who she is in this immersion, everyone nameless...." Abdu, now Ibrahim, fleshes out into a complex character with his own issues, including a passionate resistance to the expectations of his family and the limitations of his hometown. In this new environment Julie begins to recalculate who she is, while Ibrahim tirelessly applies for permits to go to Europe or America. Both characters wrestle with the difficult question of how and where to find themselves at home in the world.

Gordimer puts it this way: "To discover the exact location of a 'thing' is a simple matter of factual research. To discover the exact location of a person: where to locate the self?... To discover and take over possession of oneself, is that secretly the meaning of 'relocation'?" As the novel twists to its unpredictable end, Gordimer pushes her characters to their limits in their search for belonging.