The House Gun

Carey Harrison

A memorable blend of the topical and the timeless, at once a profound, lingering meditation on the human heart and a story so gripping you can scarcely bear to put it down. -- San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle

Jack Miles

A love story unlike any I have ever read...an elegantly conceived, flawlessly executed novel. -- The New York Times Book Review

Kurth

Why do my eyes glaze over when I see the words "Nadine Gordimer"? Here's a brilliant and accomplished writer, internationally acclaimed -- Gordimer won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1991 -- on the right side of every social cause that matters and, moreover, female, with a woman's moral authority and a sensitivity to the shades and nuances of actual human experience. You'd think I'd be crazy about a writer like this, but I'm not. Gordimer bores me. She bores me silly.

I know -- I ought to be ashamed of myself. Gordimer's courageous opposition to apartheid in her native South Africa remains among the most inspiring stances on the modern literary record. Since April 1994, when South Africa held its first free elections in many years, she has turned her eye and her acute sensibilities to a variety of other ills and social injustices: the threat of nuclear proliferation; the problem of world poverty; the question of Jerusalem; the menace of AIDS. "In art begins responsibility," Gordimer says, "and with human responsibility, justice and peace have a chance." She is so right-minded I feel like a squeaky idiot for criticizing her at all. But having finished The House Gun, Gordimer's 12th novel, my pupils feel as if they've been dilated for an eye exam and my brain as if it's been rubbed with sandpaper.

The House Gun is the disquieting, discordant, hallucinatory tale of a well-to-do South African family -- an insurance executive, Harald, a doctor, Claudia, and their enigmatic son, Duncan -- whose lives fall apart when Duncan is accused of murder. Duncan is, in fact, guilty as hell, and it's Harald and Claudia's challenge to reconcile his deed with the son they raised and the love they feel for him. In the end, in spite of their own refinement and continuing privilege in post-apartheid South Africa, they must face the fact that Duncan is guilty and that believing in him, unfortunately, is not the same as believing a word he says.

So far as I can tell, that's all there is to it. "Out of something terrible, something new," Gordimer writes, "to be lived with in a different way, surely, than life was before?" Her text is willfully disjointed, dissociative and opaque, and it's peppered with questions, "He/She" ruminations, endless ambiguities and hyphens run amok in the European manner. It's all "writing," anyhow, tailor-made for the deconstructionists, among whom Gordimer is already a hero thanks to her well-known "distrust" of conventional narrative: " -- Unfortunately. Unfortunately -- I have to tell you, when he (a wide gesture) when he opens up, when he begins to co-operate with me -- that is when he and I will have to tackle what there is to face. -- " And later: "Duncan's manner stopped their mouths against any concern about how the ordeal under scrutiny among the schizophrenics and demented had passed." That sentence had me thinking some schizophrenic thoughts of my own, and left me not caring a hoot whether Duncan hanged or his parents adjusted or not. Doubtless I'm too superficial for a writer as important as this. But for my money, if you want Moral Dilemmas, read Muriel Spark, who deals with the same sort of subject with a light and heartless hand and whose own Nobel -- you heard it here first -- is way overdue. --SalonJan. 30, 1998

Neal Ascherson

A most un-English writer, whose sensibility began with Kafka and the Russian novelists, [Gordimer] needs nobody to point out to her that the territory of Dostoevsky's Russia -- a land tortured by vast injustice and cruelty, haunted by millenary dreams of violence and redemption -- overlaps with the apartheid South Africa in which she lived and wrote for most of her life....There are a lot of separate strands in The House Gun, and they are very different in texture. One of them is about freedom and the search for freedom, and the extremes to which that search can lead....But there are also large non-fictional strands in the book....There is a reflection on the death penalty....There is a highly detailed description of the Constitutional Court in session, of the evidence that it hears, and even of the physical appearance of the judges....it feels like the reworking of pages from the notebook of an excellent journalist, an observer sitting for the first time on the Court's press benches and recording the historic scene as human rights are finally incorporated into South African supreme law. -- Neal Ascherson, The New York Review of Books

Kirkus Reviews

A passionately schematic moral anatomy of a murder. Gordimer's (None to Accompany Me, 1994, etc.) resolutely small cast of characters embodies uncomfortable social truths about contemporary South Africa—truths challenged in the course of the novel, which finally seems more universal than local. "This is not a detective story," declares the writer quite early, but rather an opportunity to explore complex human contradictions regarding race, sexual identity, social relations, and ethical authority. The book's drawback, despite its admirably close-packed construction and battering power of observation, is that Gordimer's characters are more like symbols than real people; they serve her rhetorical ends too summarily. The Lindgards are liberal white pillars of the less-racist-than-it-used-to-be South African establishment—Harald an insurance executive, Claudia a doctor—whose 27-year-old architect son Duncan shoots and kills his friend Carl Jesperson after stumbling upon Jesperson having sex with Duncan's girlfriend. But the story is only nominally about Duncan's motives. Instead, Gordimer puts us on the planet of his parents' panic as they realize for the first time that "violence is the common hell of all who are associated with it." The Lindgards are temporarily robbed of their privilege and left to cope with what little can remain of their moral confidence. Their previously untested social prestige, for instance, had meant they "had never been to a black man's home" before Hamilton Motsamai, now their son's lawyer, welcomes them to his. But so much else in their lives has also gone unquestioned, and Gordimer concentrates on showing how one destructive event canforcibly clarify whatever has led up to it. Her narrative remove makes her insights seem absolute, not conditional. Yet her "objective" stance as an insider arbiter also lifts her high above the hell she's evoking, with the result that hell can seem a rather too orchestrated and orderly place. A Dostoyevskian look at crime and punishment, although a far remove from the way the earlier master did it.