All over the place
Sebastian Smee
LOOT by Nadine Gordimer Bloomsbury, £16.99, pp. 240, ISBN 07747564973 Nadine Gordimer's lazily allusive and unkempt prose style makes most of the stories in her new collection, Loot, a pleasureless slog. This is Gordimer's tenth collection of short stories; the first, Face to Face, was published in 1948. In these latest, casually tossed off fictions, she still displays a natural short
story writer's feeling for the intimate moments and quiet epiphanies that can alter people's lives. And in several of the better stories here she either contrives neat conceits or homes in on genuinely interesting relationships. But when one has to wade through sense-jamming punctuation and pointless asides to uncover these virtues, one begins seriously to doubt whether the effort is worth it.
Several of the stories in Loot — including the title story, an unrewardingly portentous allegory — run to no more than a few pages. The bulk of the book comprises two longer pieces. One of them, 'Karma', is a spuriously linked chain of stories with, nevertheless, some fine, isolated moments, including a poignant story-within-a-story about a Russian girl's marriage into an Italian family. The other, 'Mission Statement', is a deft and subtly imagined scenario involving a female development agency official and an African government minister. But it is badly compromised by slapdash prose:
Much of the application consisted of informing New York/ Geneva tactfully as possible that the Agency's plan for the country to enter globalisation couldn't be achieved quite as visualised, and concealing how she and the Administrator were deviously, prudently finding out how to go about the process — not on their own well-trained theoretical model, but in the ways the Government itself best understood how the country might practise reforms and innovations according to the circumstances in which their constituents lived, often unimaginable in New York/Geneva, and the expectations, demands, prejudices, political rivalries within which ministers thrashed about to keep their cabinet scats.
It is surprising to read prose by any well-known author, let alone a Nobel Prize winner, in which the writer seems as bored by what she is saying as this. But there are similarly circuitous sentences all through this collection. 'Generation Gap', the only other story of real merit, examines a father's affair and the consequent breakup of an established marriage from the point of view of his grown-up children. The structure is original and the observations are wise and unforced. Gordimer is acutely sensitive to the sorts of nuances that less experienced writers might miss. But scattered throughout 'Generation Gap' are sentences such as this: 'He was always all over the place other than where you would expect to find him.' Or from the same page: 'Now they are in touch again as they have not been since a time, times, they wouldn't remember or would remember differently, each according to a need that made this sibling then seek out that, while avoiding the others.'
Is this experimental? It seems vaguely so, but how lazy and pointless it is — like a Thursday afternoon exercise in a creative writing workshop,
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