Abdu, the "garage man", is in fact Ibrahim ibn Musa, an illegal immigrant with a degree in economics from a benighted African country. Conscience-stricken Julie Summers seeks escape from the narrowed horizons of her privileged background in the newly democratic, non-racial South Africa. Julie and Ibrahim enter into an intense relationship--their sexual desire the only shared experience that mediates their cultural difference. When the authorities catch up with Ibrahim and his repatriation to his own economically ravaged desert country can no longer be avoided, Julie takes a step that amazes her friends, family and above all herself. Leaving the sheltered alternatives of her liberal background she follows Ibrahim.

In a small sand-swept town engulfed by desert, Julie struggles to fit in among the women of Ibrahim's Moslem family, negotiating the cultural minefield her presence produces. Working tirelessly to try and arrange their departure, Ibrahim wonders if Julie will ever come to learn the reality of the world that he has encountered in countless immigration offices--where he has had to "swallow the reflux of evidence that privilege can never be brought to understanding of reality, of what matters, the dignity of survival against principles".

The Pickup returns to Gordimer's familiar theme of the possibilities of personal redemption through immersion in the politically alien and culturally other. Perhaps more interesting than the oft-repeated Gordimer riff on white femininity at a loss as to what to do with itself is her (properly tentative) exploration of Ibrahim's own search for redemption and transformation through what he regards as the benefits of Westernised culture and the economic liberties of capitalism. Gordimer may seem to stray a long way from her familiar terrain of South Africa but the oblique topicality of The Pickup lies in the fact that it is a novel about the new relationships between South Africa and the rest of the vast continent of Africa to which it belongs, in both its similarities and differences. --Rachel Holmes