stray particles; In Nadine Gordimer's transfixing new novel, a man undergoes radiation and rethinks his life.(Get a Life )(Book Review)

Byline: Alice Truax

Exiled from our homes, deprived of our health and our work, who are we? Get a Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Nadine Gordimer's latest novel, opens with this provocative question. Paul Bannerman, a 35-year-old South African ecologist, has just undergone surgery for thyroid cancer, followed by a radioactive iodine infusion meant to destroy any stray malignant cells. After having spent his career fighting to protect the environment, Paul finds that his very body has become a toxic-waste site. He cannot embrace his wife or pick up his three-year-old son. For the four weeks of quarantine, his parents welcome him back to his childhood home, where his life in limbo begins.

His father, Adrian, sometimes helps him bathe, but his mother, Lyndsay, struggling against her instincts, refrains from kissing him good night. Too weak to work-at times, too weak even to talk-Paul divides his time between his bed and the garden where he played as a boy. Sometimes his wife, Benni, joins him there after her day at the advertising agency. Is he recuperating? Or is he dying? Deeply estranged from everything he has taken for granted, Paul finds that even his love for his job and his wife come into question.

This rupture in turn forces other ruptures to be acknowledged. For Lyndsay, a human-rights lawyer, her son's curiously abstracted state recalls her own extramarital affair with a colleague fifteen years earlier-an ...