"There is no privacy more inviolable than that of the prisoner. To visualize that cell in which he is thinking, to reach what he alone knows; that is a blank in the dark."

Privileged whites in post-apartheid South Africa, Harald and Claudia Lindgard have managed to live the better part of 50 years without ever confronting the deepest shadows in their culture or in their own souls. Though they conceive of themselves as liberal-minded, neither has ever taken any active political stand; neither has ever been in any black person's home. Harald sits on the board of an insurance company; Claudia is a compassionate doctor. Neither of them has ever been inside a courtroom before; neither has ever been inside a prison. When their architect-son, Duncan, is arrested for murder, both know that the charge is preposterous. But Duncan himself fails to deny his guilt, and his parents are brought by a harsh and ungainly process to accept the possibility that he has committed an unthinkable crime.

Nadine Gordimer's The House Gun is a gravely sustained exploration of their long-delayed but necessary descent into an intimate acquaintance with the culture of violence that surrounds them and that is "the common hell of all who are associated with it." The novel is a mystery, but not in the usual sense of the whodunit. Here the question of who quickly gives way to why and thence to other, still deeper quandaries of culpability, both immediate and ultimate. The enigmatic Duncan becomes a dark mirror in which his stunned parents must desperately grope for a new vision of themselves and their world--a vision that will not shatter, as their old one has, under a single blow from reality.

Gordimer's prose is mannered and severe; humor is rare, or absent. "As the couple emerge into the foyer of the courts, vast and lofty cathedral echoing with the susurration of its different kind of supplicants gathered there, Claudia suddenly breaks away, disappearing towards the sign indicating toilets. Harald waits for her among these people patient in trouble, no choice to be otherwise, for them, he is one of them, the wives, husbands, fathers, lovers, children of forgers, thieves and murderers." This difficult exposition is the reader's own dark mirror, where we as spectators fumble from one dubious explanation to the next--a twisted reflection always reminding us that, underlying this social tragedy, there is a mystery play in the old sense, and an unanswerable question: What is a human being? Paragraph after paragraph, the reader is led into deeper and deeper perceptions of the sensibilities and the dilemmas of these characters--into a quiet intimacy with their trouble that is sometimes acutely uncomfortable, but which pays off richly in an ending that reconciles our sense of the horror of violence with our desire to believe in the value of each life.


From Library Journal
Harald and Claudia, highly successful professionals (he heads up an insurance company, she is a physician), find their comfortable life in post-apartheid South Africa turned upside down when their only son is accused of murdering one of his housemates, using the communal "house gun" they had purchased for protection. The parents are dumbfounded when Duncan does not deny the crime. How could their son be a murderer, and are they somehow to blame? Duncan acted out of jealousy, but was it heterosexual jealousy or something else? He is going to be defended by a black attorney. Will the attorney's lack of courtroom experience be a liability, or will his race favorably influence the judge? Harald and Claudia are ashamed to find themselves asking these questions. Nobel laureate Gordimer's book is much more ambitious than the plot-driven thrillers of Scott Turow or John Grisham. It is a novel of ideas that investigates troubling issues of race and gender, but it is also a subtle character study that avoids easy stereotypes. Gordimer's trademark prose style, with its sudden shifts of voice and points of view, seems especially well suited to capturing the moral ambiguities of South African life. Highly recommended.-?Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch., Los AngelesCopyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The Atlantic Monthly, Phoebe-Lou Adams
The social or political implications of Ms. Gordimer's novels are usually just that--implications underlying an interesting story. In this case the basic question--Does a violent society provoke violence in nonviolent individuals?--is brought to the surface and debated (at wearisome length, to be honest about it) in a murder trial. The novel's major characters are the parents of the killer, a prosperous, quietly liberal white couple who hire an expert black lawyer to defend the son about whose life they knew almost nothing until he shot a former lover with "the house gun," which is standard domestic equipment in South Africa. Ms. Gordimer's exploration of racial and generational differences is subtle, but the position of the parents as helpless bystanders in the legal process deprives the book of much of the narrative drive that this fine author normally provides.


The Wall Street Journal, Merle Rubin
At times, the novel seems to suggest that it is indeed guns (lying around the house) that are responsible for killing people (who might else have survived an outburst of rage in the form of a flying fist); at other times, it seems to point to darker, Dostoevskian motivations. An assiduous chronicler of her country's vicissitudes, Ms. Gordimer is more adept at capturing surfaces than probing depths. Here she is better at exposing the limitations of the hapless upper-middle-class parents than at uncovering whatever darkness may lie at the heart of their son's violent act.


The New York Times Book Review, Jack Miles
The murder is not a political act, but this elegantly conceived, flawlessly executed novel surely is, for it arrives in the heat of a major South African debate.... Along the way, using to brilliant effect the jagged abruptness of her prose style, Gordimer tells a love story unlike any I have ever read.


The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Richard Eder
Gordimer's portrait of the Lindgards, in their initial state of stunned disbelief, their impulse to try to find some control of the situation and their slow apprenticeship to helplessness, is masterly. She writes with an irony that accommodates a fearful sense of the pain and dislocation of each of the Lindgards' discoveries. She writes, in fact, something like a doctor whose sympathy never clouds a cold knowledge of the patient's lethal disability. Nobody conveys better the operations of mental shock.


From 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 can forcibly 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. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


The New York Review of Books, Neal Ascherson
Reading The House Gun is, at times, hearing a voice which has been close and familiar speaking on the telephone from a remote country. The sensibility is recognizably the same, but the people and scenes and colors the voice wants to convey cannot be easily put across in the old tones, or evoked with the familiar allusions.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

A house gun—kept like a house cat: a fact of ordinary life at the end of this century where violence is in the air. With that gun the architect son of Harald and Claudia has committed what is to them the unimaginable act—shot dead the intimate friend he discovered making love to his woman. And the relationship between the three is revealed to have unimaginable meaning....

How has Duncan come to abandon the sanctity of human life they taught him? What kind of loyalty do parents owe a self-confessed murderer? In post-apartheid South Africa the defense of their son's life is in the hands of a black man: Hamilton Motsamai, a flamboyant, distinguished advocate returned from political exile. The balance of everything in the parents' world is turned upside down.

The House Gun is a passionate narrative of that final text of complex human relations we call love, moving from the intimate to the general condition. If it is a parable of present violence it is also an affirmation of the will to reconciliation that starts where it must, between individual men and women.

SYNOPSIS

In 1994 South Africa's constitution was rewritten and free general elections were held for the first time in the nation's history. With Nelson Mandela's election as South Africa's first black president, the last vestiges of the apartheid system were finally eliminated.

This long-awaited freedom awaits social ratification from a population accustomed to defending itself along racial divides. Violence has shifted from the public to the private domain, and even the house gun, no longer needed for external protection, poses a new threat.

In the context of this transitional stage, Nadine Gordimer's book The House Gun explores with stark reality the reverberations of violence as it penetrates the affluent lives of Harald and Claudia Lindgard and their son, Duncan. Accused of murdering a friend, Duncan faces a trial that tests the smug certainties of the Lindgards' privileged life. Disbelief and guilt force a restructuring of their ethics and finally a redefinition of their relationship with each other.

While revealing the residual tensions of post-apartheid South Africa, Gordimer's observation of the sustaining forces of human relationships is universal.

FROM THE CRITICS

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

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

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.