The House Gun

By Nadine Gordimer
1999
Rating: 4

The House Gun had some shiny spots in the 100 pages I managed to get through, but not enough to sustain the novel, given a plot that held a good deal of promise, but was stifled by over-generous servings of exposition that was not particularly interesting.

The main characters are the parents of a 27-year-old who may have murdered his house-mate, and it’s set in South Africa. The parents and son are white, the defense lawyer is black.

In addition to a number of passages of exposition that were dull, the novel suffered from melodrama. The mother character in particular was hard to stomach after a while.