Nadine Gordimer's 'No Time Like the Present'

Literature marks the days. Nadine Gordimer, born in a mining town near Johannesburg in 1923, has written 37 books, including "No Time Like the Present," her 16th novel. Her life is woven into South Africa's -- the landscape, the people, the politics -- in ways we rarely see anymore, by which I mean that literature and politics have gone their separate ways for a while.

Gordimer joined the African National Congress (ANC) in 1960, when it was illegal to do so. When Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990, Gordimer was one of the first people he asked to see. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, and has followed the life of post-apartheid South Africa with every tool at her disposal: essay, short story, novel and nonfiction. It has not been a life of compromise -- she was attacked by an intruder in her home in 2006 and refused, despite pleading from friends, to move into a gated community.

This is important because "No Time Like the Present" expresses many things -- pride, yes, in her country, but a great deal of disappointment, too. It begins as an Adam and Eve story: Steve Reed, white South African boy, and Rebecca Jabulile (Jabu), black South African girl from Zululand, have married and live with their little girl, Sindiswa, in an apartment in Johannesburg. Oh, how we want them to succeed! We want these young revolutionaries, who suffered alongside their comrades in the struggle for the vote, to have a piece of the new world.

But, as Gordimer writes in one of her signature sentences, packed with portent and meaning: "Decisions always divide into practice." Should they move to the suburbs? Yes. Should Jabu quit her teaching job to become a lawyer? Yes. Should Steve, a chemical engineer, quit his job at the paint company (a nice cover for his work during the revolution, making Molotov cocktails), and teach at the University? Yes. Should they take advantage of their newfound privilege to hire a nanny? Send their child to private school? Buy all manner of things when there are people living under tin roofs in shacks? Ah, well, now it gets difficult.

There are challenges everywhere, at every step, every decision. But Steve and Jabu begin to find themselves on different sides of issues that were once so clear. Protesters at Steve's university threaten important work in his labs. Jabu, now a judge, hears cases in which heroes of the revolution are revealed to have feet of clay. Are Steve and Jabu willing to look away while the politician they supported is accused of rape? One compromise, you see, leads to another and the whole life unravels. Gordimer has seen it happen. For a new life, alas, the couple will now have to look elsewhere, as pioneers and nomads have since the beginning of human history.

"No Time Like the Present" is Gordimer's best novel since her first, "The Lying Days," written in 1953. Old age brings wisdom, but not necessarily softening. If anything, she has whittled her expectations to a spear point, and now we must all live up to them.