CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

A SON'S VIOLENT ACT TESTS A COUPLE'S ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT LOVE, RESPONSIBILITY, AND SOCIETY

Author: By Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, January 18, 1998

Page: L1

Section: Books

The scourge of South Africa as her backdrop, Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer has achieved the finest results in her fiction through the particularities of human design -- the back broken by one more day of apartheid, the private cruelties of a marriage wracked by societal stress. Her characters are not so much beyond history as they are trapped inside it. They are the anonymous faces on a Johannesburg bus, or waiting in line at a clinic, or suffering the numbness of having looked the other way.

But imagine a life lived without the surrounds of racial injustice, random cruelty, daily moral compromise. It has been Gordimer's task to comprehend her characters' web of circumstance and thus attempt to separate them from it. You might call this creative expansiveness a form of hope, though it's rarely considered with more than one foot out of the shadows. In ``The House Gun,'' Gordimer goes to the nexus of that dilemma, trying to isolate individual responsibility -- the laws of the human heart -- from the lessons taught by a heartless social order. The lessons written in stone, in other words, but not necessarily in the books.

Harald and Claudia Lindgard are a particular kind of Gordimer pair: well-meaning but uninvolved white liberals, good-hearted bourgeois who keep to themselves. She treats black people in the clinic where she's a physician, but has no black friends; he works out a program for low-income housing at the insurance company where he's an executive. Their son, Duncan, is a 27-year-old architect who drops in for dinner when he can -- bringing the occasional girlfriend along, hugging his mother before he retreats to his own private life.

Then someone comes to the Lindgard door and changes their world forever: The son has been arrested, there has been a shooting, a man is dead. The situation unfolds piecemeal over the next few days, with the Lindgards alternately reeling from fear and trying to remain upright, to do what they must for their son. He may have been in some kind of love triangle, they ascertain; the young woman with whom he was living may be some sort of monster. There were other men, perhaps gay housemates, in the neighboring house; one of them was killed with the household gun. A man working in the garden heard a pistol shot and then saw Duncan leave -- saw him drop something in the underbrush, where the weapon was later found. Behind bars, their son will tell them almost nothing.

But Harald finds a note among Duncan's things, a quote from Dostoyevsky's ``The Idiot,'' which suggests that his son may not have possessed the emotional innocence they had assumed. It is a quote from Rogozhin about Nastasya Filippovna, whom he will later murder out of enraged jealousy: ``She would have drowned herself long ago if she had not had me; that's the truth. She doesn't do that because, perhaps, I am more dreadful than the water.''

Those ominous words appear early in ``The House Gun,'' and dominate the tone even as the story unfolds with Gordimer's characteristic terseness. As his senior counsel, Duncan has hired the inimitably eloquent Hamilton Motsamai -- a black man the Lindgards never would have known socially, a man in whose hands they have now put their lives. A man, it should be said, who until recently could never have known such power over whites. The nuances of these shifting sands are rendered with intricacy and grace; it has long been one of Gordimer's gifts to deliver the complexity of black-white South African relations in their full emotional array. But for all of Motsamai's kindness and legal maneuverings, Duncan's guilt or innocence is the Lindgards' stone-heavy burden to wake with at 3 a.m. -- to comb the wreckage of their own memories, and to wonder what we all wonder in the midst of crisis: how this could have happened to them.

The strongest part of ``The House Gun'' is Gordimer's exploration of the devastation visited by such an act: the poison of accusation, so lethal it tends to rewrite history; the wild back pastures of parental love, where loyalty and horror can reside hand in hand. Harald looks to God for his answers; Claudia, to medicine -- neither can rely anymore solely on their common bond, which, after all, begot this child, this murder charge. And yet the devotion beneath their fear and even revulsion is the transcendent meter of this novel: Behind the most unforgivable act must lie the notion of charity itself. Harald knows this, even though he has come upon such knowledge in the hardest way -- knows that this moment has ``monstrously displaced everything else, his fifty years, eclipsed the sun and shut off the air of all he had learnt.''

Moving between the trial's unfoldings and the Lindgards' emotional realizations, ``The House Gun'' attempts to trace the correlation between Duncan's Dostoyevskian act and the violence that pervades his world -- ``because violence is the common hell of all who are associated with it.'' Gordimer is rarely an oblique writer; she is a furiously political one, and that passion can make her heavy-handed. The connections between the state and the individual seem forced here, made no better by drawing parallels between Duncan's act and the murderous imaginings of the ultimate Russian existentialist. Weirder still, she has left out entirely any characterization of poor Carl Jespersen, the victim who lost his life twice -- once at the hands of Duncan Lindgard, again at the behest of Gordimer, who never really brought him to life to begin with. Duncan himself fares little better: It is his act that is memorable, his fleeting but indelible role as ``the house gun,'' rather than the man himself.

``The House Gun'' is an odd novel: unsettling, sometimes wrenching in the corridors of guilt and morality it travels; frustrating in the political straw men it erects and then discards. For all the societal links Gordimer explores, it is that moment between Duncan and Jespersen that matters finally -- the eternal aftermath of a flash of rage, the enduring challenge of love coming up against hatred. I will always be grateful for the presence in the world of Nadine Gordimer, who has delivered in literature a South Africa most of us could not have known without her. But we don't read Dostoyevsky only to learn about Russia.

NADINE GORDIMER

From ``The House Gun''