The House Gun by Nadine Gordimer

It is not only the man on the sofa who is the victim. Harald and Claudia have, each, within them, now, a malignant resentment against their son that would seem as impossible to exist in them as an ability to kill could exist in hm. The resentment is shameful. What is shameful cannot be shared. What is shameful, separates. But the way to deal with the resentment will come, must come, individually to both. The resentment is shameful: because what is it that they did to him? Is that were the answer--Why? Why?--is to be found?

"Something terrible happened," begins Nadine Gordimer's novel The House Gun. That something, as Harald and Claudia Lindgard are about to learn, is an act of terrible violence: their son Duncan has shot his roommate to death using the gun kept in the house to ward off intruders. The facts, such as they are, will follow: Duncan walked in on Carl, with whom he had a brief sexual relationship, in the middle of having sex with his current girlfriend, Natalie. The shooting took place the following day; the gardener found the gun tossed into the garden. There's never any real doubt that Duncan has committed the act, but whether he is guilty--what even it means to be guilty; whether the impulse to kill comes from the parents, or without, from social contagion; whether Natalie's cruelty and Carl's thoughtlessness are part of that guilt--is a question that must be worked out over months at trial. The only sure thing is that Duncan's life, and the life of Harald and Claudia, has been forever transformed: "The old Gregorian," Gordimer writes, "cannot register this day."

Duncan's lawyer is Hamilton Motsamai, a proud, talented lawyer--a black lawyer. The House Gun was, as far as I know, Gordimer's first novel after the end of apartheid in South Africa, and one of the many questions that hang over the novel is whether the nation is capable of change, capable of reconciliation. Motsamai's position as Duncan's lawyer represents a great reversal; had the shooting taken place only a few years earlier, it would have been unthinkable. Harald and Claudia's mild liberalism is tested: Motsamai seems capable, sure, but will a black man be as persuasive to a judge? Their awareness of this reversal is so shameful that only such a crisis can really bring it to the surface; the conviction, deep down, that it ought to be one of them in the seat of the accused and one of us in the position of the defense attorney.

The gun itself is in image of a great rot at the heart of South African society. Novels like July's People show that Gordimer was, I think, a pessimist about apartheid; they suggest that racial liberation will only be bought at the price of enormous violence. The race war imagined in July's People never came to pass, but The House Gun refutes the idea that the country's transformation was a non-violent one. The "house gun" is the logical endpoint of a society in which violence is endemic. That violence, fostered by racial inequity, manifests in the form of the gun, and though it was purchased for self-defense, such violence cannot be contained; it ends with whites shooting whites. This possibility is a theme teased by Motsamai in his defense, and developed by the judge, though whether it helps us understand what Duncan has done is never totally clear. When violence is everywhere, who can say where any particular act began?

The mystery at the heart of the act is also at the heart of The House Gun. Duncan, Harald, and Claudia, all watch as Motsamai puts forth a theory of Duncan's mental state that will exonerate him. Harald sees that what Motsamai does is a performance, really, a narrative whose artificiality is substituted for that which is unexplainable. Gordimer shows how deep our motivations are, how primal, how little we understand them, and how they intersect with the dangerous forces that lie outside of us. The long climax, in which the judge patiently elaborates on the evidence in preparation for the ruling he is about to give, kept me enthralled as much as it does the people in the courtroom--a kind of heightened attention that Gordimer tells us resembles Simone Weil's definition of prayer--but while we crave for the judge's sentence to make human behavior explainable, we remain suspicious that it is really beyond our understanding and our judgment.