From Publishers Weekly
While Nobel Prize-winner Gordimer's trenchant fiction has always achieved universal relevance in capturing apartheid and its lingering effects in South Africa, this new work attains still broader impact as she explores the condition of the world's desperate dispossessed. To Julie Summer, rebellious daughter of a rich white investment banker, the black mechanic she meets at a garage is initially merely an interesting person to add to her circle of bohemian friends. But as their relationship swiftly escalates, Julie comes to understand her lover's perilous tightrope attempts to find a country that will shelter him. Abdu, as he calls himself (it's not his real name), is an illegal immigrant from an abysmally poor Arab country. Now on the verge of deportation from South Africa, he's forced to return to his ancestral village. Julie insists on marrying him and going with him, despite his fears that she does not understand how primitive conditions are in the desert town where his strict Muslim family lives. Abdu (now Ibrahim) is astonished when she willingly does manual labor to earn his family's respect. They clash, however, over his decision to try once again to gain entry into a country that discriminates against immigrants from his part of the world. Gradually realizing that she has finally found a center to her heretofore aimless life, Julie matures; in many ways, she has become more cognizant of reality than her frantically hopeful husband. Gordimer handles these psychological nuances with understated finesse. With characteristic bravado, she reprises a character from her previous book, The House Gun, to show how some blacks are now faring in a reorganized South African society. The brilliant black defense lawyer in that book has taken advantage of opportunities to join a banking conglomerate; he is now involved in "the intimate language of money." It's the people still trapped by economic chaos and racism who now interest this inveterate and eloquent champion of the world's outcasts. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
An incinerating affair between a wealthy young woman and an Arab mechanic. Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
*Starred Review* Gordimer crosses new borders in this contemporary novel that takes a postapartheid young South African woman out to a widening world. Julie Summers knows that her father and his rich white friends can move about the globe as they please. Everyone in Julie's world, rich and poor, is an immigrant somehow. Ashamed of her background, she has left the suburbs to hang out with the hip multiracial crowd in the city; then one day she picks up an illegal Arab immigrant, "Abdu," who is working as an auto mechanic. They become lovers, and when he's deported, she insists on going back with him as his wife to his poor desert village. He's desperate to leave again, and she finds herself shuffling along in lines for papers, just like the migrants under apartheid. Without romanticism, Gordimer dramatizes the paradox of privilege. Julie's confidence comes from the shelter she rejects. In contrast, her husband can barely allow himself to love her, sure that this is just another adventure for the suburban girl. His determination is a long way from the idealistic conversation that flows at Julie's cafe, where "indignation went back and forth across the cappuccino." Julie is a tourist in Abdu's village, where the village radio blares Easternized American pop and the daily call to prayer is electronic. It's the places that make the story so compelling, and Gordimer captures the contrasts in the beat of her prose, whether it's the frenzy of the city block, the sweep of the desert, or the lovers' intimacy and distance in their lean-to room. Even on the last page, Gordimer is still surprising us about the search for home. Hazel Rochman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
Gordimer is one of the great living writers.
--Carey Harrison, San Francisco Chronicle



Book Description
When Julie Summers's car breaks down on a sleazy street in a South African city, a young Arab mechanic named Abdu comes to her aid. Their attraction to one another is fueled by different motives. Julie is in rebellion against her wealthy background and her father; Abdu, an illegal immigrant, is desperate to avoid deportation to his impoverished country. In the course of their relationship, there are unpredictable consequences, and overwhelming emotions will overturn each one's notion of the other. Set in the new South Africa and in an Arab village in the desert, The Pickup is "a masterpiece of creative empathy . . . a gripping tale of contemporary anguish and unexpected desire, and it also opens the Arab world to unusually nuanced perception" (Edward W. Said).


About the Author
Nadine Gordimer was born in 1923 to Jewish immigrants in the small town of Springs, Transvaal, South Africa, a mining town outside of Johannesburg. She attended school at a convent and published her first short story as a teenager in the children's section of a Johannesburg Sunday newspaper. In 1945 she spent a year at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Living in Johannesburg since 1948, Gordimer has been a vocal activist against apartheid, publicly criticizing the government's policies and activities. A relentless defender of freedom of self-expression-three of her novels were banned in South Africa-Gordimer has served as a steering committee member of the Anti-Censorship Action Group. Her writing illustrates the need for political change and, more generally, the dynamics at the intersection of public and private life. But it is the combination of these qualities with her immense storytelling skills and the power with which she addresses such universal themes as responsibility, freedom, and the nature of love that has won her a reputation as one of the world's great writers. Among her many literary honors are the 1974 Booker Prize and the 1991 Nobel Prize for Literature.

FROM OUR EDITORS

Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer offers a modern-day Romeo & Juliet about a fiercely passionate love affair torn apart by the vicissitudes of citizenship and immigration.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Who picked up whom? Is the pickup the illegal immigrant desperate to evade deportation to his impoverished desert country? Or is the pickup the powerful businessman's daughter trying to escape a priveleged background she despises? When Julie Summers' car breaks down in a sleazy street, at a garage a young Arab emerges from beneath the chassis of a vehicle to aid her. The consequences develop as a story of unpredictably relentless emotions that overturn each one's notion of the other, and of the solutions life demands for different circumstances. She insists on leaving the country with him. The love affair becomes a marriage-that state she regards as a social convention appropriate to her father's set and her mother remarried in California, but decreed by her 'grease monkey' in order to present her respectably to his family.

In the Arab village, while he is dedicated to escaping, again, to what he believes is a fulfilling life in the West, she is drawn by a counter-magnet of new affinities in his close family and the omnipresence of the desert.

A novel of great power and concision, psychological surprises and unexpected developments, The Pickup is a story of the rites of passage that are emigration/immigration, where love can survive only if stripped of all certainties outside itself.

FROM THE CRITICS

Richard Bode

A tale of personal adventure told with fidelity, insight, and poetry. What literature is all about!

Jill McCorkle

Beautifully crafted and rich in historical detail, The Wolf Pit is a stunning novel, mesmerizing from beginning to end.

Bill McKibben

There are places left on earth — fewer all the time — for real adventure . . . remarkable book . . . .

Elizabeth Spencer

. . . Marly Youmans has shown herself as a writer of skill and daring. She merits comparison only with the best.

Howard Bahr