No Time Like the Present: A Novel by Nadine Gordimer (review)

Nadine Gordimer's latest novel is perhaps the most comprehensive work of fiction to address the breadth of issues confronting South Africa and its citizens today. This alone stands as an achievement. The list of challenges is not short: economic injustice, unemployment, HIV-AIDS, corruption, crime, immigration, xenophobia, the Jacob Zuma trials, and school bullying.

The protagonists are Jabulile Gumede and Steven Reed, who met as comrades in the liberation struggle and subsequently married in exile. One is a Zulu Methodist and the other is a nonpracticing Jew. They decide to buy a home among other formerly exiled comrades in a small community that was formerly an Afrikaner town. A neighboring house, once a Dutch Reformed church with a pool, is being rented by the Dolphins, several gay men who provide a social venue for themselves and the nearby comrades.

Steve teaches engineering at a technical college, and Jabu studies to become an attorney in a legal system undergoing extensive reform. Their daughter, Sindiswa, is bright and academically inclined; her younger brother, Gary Elias, is a bit withdrawn but an avid athlete. On holiday, Jabu takes the children to her father's homestead, which is central to the rural community, where her father, a church elder, is principal of the church-related school. Steve comes on occasion, and though he is a bit out of place, he is welcomed. Jabu, raised as her father's favorite child, enjoyed schooling and a teacher-training education in Swaziland, more typically the privilege of a son. Her bond with her father runs deep and strong, though it is tested during the trials of Jacob Zuma for alleged corruption and rape, and even more perhaps by his ascension to the presidency. Zuma and her father had been friends during their youth, and, to Elias Siphiwe Gumede, the populist Zulu politician could do no wrong. Jabu, out of respect for her father raises political issues but avoids the fervent Zuma supporters that she witnessed at the trial.

The comrades share a deep ambivalence about Zuma, one of their former leaders and a Robben Island prisoner. None seems to have been comfortable with the direction of the ANC leadership once Madiba (President Mandela) had been succeeded by Thabo Mbeki, whose own term was cut short by dissent in the movement. While Jabu thrives on the practice of law at the Justice Centre and a private firm, Steve speaks out for educational reform and open enrollment. Both are keenly uncomfortable with the rising xenophobia directed at immigrants from Zimbabwe and points north.

Gordimer deftly uses this disparate group of now middle-class comrades to construct a lens through which she illuminates the challenges confronting the liberation movement that has become a political party. Failures such as the policies on HIV-AIDS and immigration are starkly evident. The country's flaws, including the inability or disinclination to deal effectively with economic reforms, housing, jobs, women's rights—all advanced in the Freedom Charter and reinforced in the Constitution—meet with criticism, though the comrades recognize the pressures (internal and external) of neoliberal capitalism confronted by the ANC. Meanwhile, the hypocrisy, corruption, and wealth of some movement leaders generate frustration and cynicism among those who fought for social justice.

Just as Gordimer's early work captured the inhumanity and evils of apartheid, the characters she develops in this work provide a unique and in some ways unimpeachable critique of the present. Read at this level, the novel is a successful commentary on contemporary South Africa. Unfortunately, the same character development used as a foil to society is less successful in achieving a convincingly credible interplay among the key individuals. Much to Gordimer's credit, however, the relationship of Jabu to her Zulu family rings true. For instance, Jabu and Steve must secure a housekeeper. Rather than have them hire a "servant," with all that entails, Baba Gumede prevails upon them to take in an older woman from among...