Perhaps the flat language is an expression of flat lives, of existence marked by decency and generosity at the expense of desire. Once Paul goes home to Berenice, and Adrian and Lyndsay depart for Mexico on a vacation, the neat pattern of the nuclear family is changed entirely. The vacation awakes Adrian's buried interest in archaeology and leads him to stay on in Mexico. Once on his own, he falls in love with the Norwegian guide, mirroring Lyndsay's affair with a foreign lawyer fifteen years earlier. Suddenly, the novel is filled with the possibility of desire and fulfilment: Berenice's wish to have another child; Adrian's move to Norway with the guide; and Lyndsay's adopting of a black orphan infected with AIDS. Everyone wants to get a life beyond the comfortable, reasonably happy ones they already have. And, unlike in the earlier novels where the system could be depended on to administer the shocks that jolted people out of their skins, here they need to provoke themselves into new states of being.

This works well enough at the level of ideas, and the pace of the story gets some momentum from the depiction of adultery. In the letters from Adrian we glimpse the happiness of a conventional man awakened to new possibilities in the last years of his life his last months, in fact, although he doesn't know that. Similarly, Lyndsay's affair is evoked wonderfully: the initial hesitant gesture and the consummation; the flurry of airports and hotel rooms; the gradual transformation of clandestine passion into something very like the marriage it is not supposed to be.

Adultery is a recurrent motif in Gordimer's work. In its promise of transgression and freedom, it shares much with the miscegenation feared by apartheid. And there is an autobiographical element as well: Gordimer's mother had an affair with a doctor which required inventing an illness for the young Nadine, an illness that forced her into a sedentary childhood of books and writing. Whatever the reasons, Gordimer's exploration of extramarital territory is so skilful that she can achieve startling clarity and empathy even within the limits of short fiction, as in the title story of the collection Why Haven't You Written (1979):

The first call came and they sat on with his arm round her. She dared not open her mouth; misery stopped her throat like vomit; he knew. At the second call, they rose. He embraced her clumsily in his coat, they said the usual reassurances to each other, she passed through the barrier and then came back in a crazy zigzag like a mouse threatened by a broom, to clutch his hand another time. Ashamed, half-dropping her things, she always did that, an unconscious effort to make no contact definitively the last.

But the very use of a theme dominant in her writing highlights the deficiencies of the present book. In contrast to the passage above, with its subtle rhythm and shifting points of view, Get a Life offers little variation or beauty in the tracing of thought-patterns. From Lyndsay to Paul to Adrian there is something shallow about the stream of consciousness, a perfunctory quality to the writing that forces one to return to the ideas.

There is the suggestion that the affliction of these characters is more universal than was the case with their predecessors. Berenice's advertising agency, Paul's ecological campaigns and Lyndsay's legal work all point to the fact that South Africa has successfully transformed itself into a late capitalist society, committed to universal forms of inequality rather than its own special brand of injustice. This blurring of boundaries between the local and the global is sketched out swiftly in the context of the proposed nuclear plant Paul and his colleague Thapelo hope to prevent:

The direst of all threats in the world's collective fear -terrorism -beyond suicide bombings, introduction of deadly viruses, fatal chemical substances in innocent packaging, Mad Cow disease, is still "nuclear capability". Another catch-all: the possession as natural resources, in a country, of certain primary elements and the ability to mine and refine these for its own nuclear armament or for sale to that of others; the construction of a nuclear plant/reactor; the testing of a nuclear weapon.