Abstractions

By Paul Gray

MY SON'S STORY

by Nadine Gordimer

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

277 pages; $19.95

A teenage boy who is supposed to be studying for high school exams slips out one afternoon to take in a movie and has the bad luck, going in, to run into his father coming out of the theater. Embarrassment ensues on both sides: the father is with a woman who is not his wife.

There is more in My Son's Story than domestic tensions. South African author Nadine Gordimer has never acquired the luxury of believing that private lives can proceed in a political vacuum. The stark choices imposed by apartheid allow no such privilege. And so the three characters who meet in the lobby of a recently desegregated movie house in Johannesburg represent more than the sum of personal discomforts caused by this encounter. The father and son are "colored," as determined by South Africa's laws, and the woman in question is white.

How did this contretemps occur, and what are its aftereffects? In answering these questions, Gordimer moves beyond individual problems toward the anguish of a society on the brink of change. Sonny, the father, was a teacher who ran afoul of the white authorities by allowing his students to demonstrate support for a black boycott of schools. Arrested and detained, Sonny is finally convicted of subversive activities and sentenced to two years in prison. But he has gained allies in his struggle, including Hannah Plowman, a white woman who represents an international human-rights organization.

Once out of prison, Sonny realizes that he is in love with Hannah and that his new shadow status in the underground means he does not have to explain his absences from home to his wife Aila, his daughter Baby or his son Will. They all, however, wind up knowing where and with whom he has been spending his time. The consequences of such knowledge prove as shattering as the strictures of apartheid.

Those looking for easy or pleasant answers to the problem of racial strife will not find them in My Son's Story. What emerges instead is another of Gordimer's gripping portraits of people caught up in -- and defined by -- fatal abstractions.