Nothing Terrible Happened

Sophie Harrison

• The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer
  Bloomsbury, 270 pp, £16.99, September 2001, ISBN 0 7474 5427 2

In an unidentified South African city that is probably Johannesburg, in a time that is probably now, a group of people meet in a bohemian café. For 28-year-old Julie it’s not just a café, it’s a substitute for home, a shelter to her surrogate family of hippies and poets, a gathering just like those of the old revolutionary days. But apartheid, the system that dominated every aspect of South African life, is over. The worst problem that Julie and her friends have to deal with now – a new problem in the country they live in – is their lives’ sudden inconsequentiality. The characters in Nadine Gordimer’s previous novels have generally had some kind of social purpose – they are lawyers, or doctors, or ‘politicals’ of one kind or another. But Julie and her friends have no purpose, no particular place in the world. She’s the daughter of a rich white businessman with a hyphenated surname. She’s estranged from her family, but by choice rather than circumstance. She comes from that universally recognisable place known in this novel only as the Suburbs, and she’s at something of a loose end.