My Son's Story by Nadine Gordimer

For months when they talked after love-making it was of the remote places they would like to go together. Islands off this or that continent. Forests in the mountains. Nothing but gulls or owls. Like all lovers, they did not know they were trying to prolong by transformation into words, into the future tense, the physical illusion of personal freedom that fades as the lulled and sated senses come back and will relay the knowledge of time passing with traffic: work, loss, hunger and pan, pacing out there in the street: other people.

One day, Will meets his father by happenstance at a movie theater. His father's not alone; he has a woman with him, a white woman. Only recently have colored South Africans like Will and his father, Sonny, been able to legally patronize white theaters; for both father and son it is a kind of provocation. But for Will, it's also a realization that his father is not all that he seems. Sonny is a former teacher who has become a powerful leader and orator among those in what they call "the struggle"; part of his appeal has always been his upstanding character and the support of his stalwart wife, Aila. But Will clocks immediately what Sonny is doing at the theater, hiding an affair that has come to be the center of his life. As time passes, Sonny's attachment to the white woman, Hannah, will quietly and subtly--because in Gordimer's books, politics and power move glacially, and the explosions are usually off-screen distractions--compromise his position within the movement. But more importantly, it will compromise his position with his son.

It's interesting that Gordimer titles this My Son's Story. If anything, it ought to be called My Father's Story. It is, at heart, Sonny's story, and it alternates between the icy third person that is Gordimer's trademark and a fiery first-person from Sonny's perspective. These sections, where Sonny fulminates against his father, are the best parts of the book, and something I can't remember seeing in anything else that Gordimer's ever written. Sonny's anger at his father's infidelity and betrayal grows all out of proportion, and we can see, in subtle ways, that he lets it cloud his judgment, never quite understanding what others are saying. When he sees in his mother's expression and actions a recognition of his father's infidelity, is he right? Or does he see what he wants to see in order to make a closer ally of his mother? At the novel's end, the Sonny-narrator tells us that he has filled in the gaps of what he does not know; the third-person sections are him, too. Of course, that brings up several Oedipal questions about what it means for Sonny to describe the physical intimacy between his father and his father's lover.

One thing I liked about My Son's Story is that we get moments of anti-Black racism crisply and clearly. That's not actually the case in most of her novels, which I think present racism as something structural that happens at a deeper level. She's not often interested in the racists and bigots as much as the people fighting them. But here we see Sonny and his family move to a white neighborhood, trying to heighten the contradictions of South African society. And for a while, their presence is tolerated, until Aila is arrested for keeping a cache of weapons, and the neighborhood becomes a mob, which burns down the family's house. We are expecting, perhaps, the book to move toward a final confrontation between Will and his father, for the son to explode. But the destabilizing force turns out to be Aila, as well as Will's sister Baby. As things fall apart, we see a deeper source of Will's resentment and envy: the expectation that he of all the family will live the "normal life" that is the reward of political struggle, a struggle which he is not permitted to enter. It's a hard thing, perhaps, to bear the rewards but none of the sacrifices. The novel, then, is Will looking at himself through his father's eyes; that's why it's My Son's Story and not My Father's.