My Son's Story

The Discovery

Will Sonny’s teenage son, sees his father outside a cinema in Johannesburg, with a white woman who is not his mother. The scene is observed, not confronted—Will watches, understands, and does not speak. The moment is the novel’s hinge: before it, Will’s father is a hero; after it, Will’s father is a man.

Gordimer’s novel is narrated by Will, which is unusual for her—most of her work uses a third-person narrative mode that maintains ironic distance. Will’s first-person voice is intimate, wounded, and precise: a teenager describing the catastrophic revision of a parent is also, implicitly, describing the revision of himself. If his father is not who he thought he was, then Will is not who he thought he was either. Identity, in a family as in a nation, turns out to be relational.

The woman Sonny is seeing—Hannah—works for the anti-apartheid movement. She is white, which in the logic of apartheid is a transgression with multiple dimensions: it is forbidden by law, it is a betrayal of Sonny’s family, and it is also, in Hannah’s case, a form of political seriousness (she is a human rights worker, not a frivolous attachment). The novel refuses to simplify any of these dimensions. Sonny’s affair is self-serving; it is also politically legible; it is also destroying his family. Gordimer holds all of this without resolving it.

The Coloured Community

Sonny is not Black in the apartheid classification; he is ‘coloured’—a term for South Africans of mixed racial heritage, who occupied a specific and fraught position in the apartheid racial hierarchy, above Black South Africans in some legal respects and below white South Africans in all meaningful ones. Gordimer’s portrait of this community is one of the most careful and specific in South African fiction: the particular self-consciousness of people who are categorized by a system they did not design, who negotiate their identity daily in a space between categories that the system treats as absolute.

Sonny’s story is partly a story of self-education and political awakening—from schoolteacher to activist, from the private world of his family to the public world of the movement. The activism offers him an identity beyond the racial category: in the movement, he is not ‘coloured,’ he is a comrade, and comradeship is a form of belonging that apartheid cannot fully contain. This is part of what makes the affair with Hannah legible: she is the embodiment of the movement’s promise that race does not determine relationship.

But Sonny’s awakening has costs that the political narrative of the movement does not account for. His wife Aila is left behind—literally, at first, as Sonny’s activism keeps him away; and then in the deeper sense, as his emotional and erotic life is now elsewhere. The novel watches what Aila does with this abandonment, and what she does is remarkable and quiet and entirely her own.

The Price of Activism

The novel’s final accounting is distributed across the family. Sonny becomes a public figure and a private failure—the political biography that will be written about him will be heroic, and Will knows it, and Will knows that he is the only one who knows what the heroic biography leaves out. Baby, the daughter, moves through rage into something more dangerous—a political violence that the movement itself cannot quite contain, that goes beyond the disciplined activism Sonny practices into something rawer and less predictable. Aila, the wife, makes her own choice, in her own silence, that is revealed near the novel’s end and that reframes everything that preceded it.

And Will becomes a writer. The novel we have been reading is, in its final pages, revealed to be Will’s act—the story he is telling about his father, which is also the story he is telling about himself. The writing is simultaneously a form of revenge (he will tell the truth the biography will not tell), a form of love (he cannot stop caring about the man he watched outside the cinema), and a form of inheritance: he has taken what his father gave him—the literary education, the political consciousness, the capacity for attention—and used it to do something his father cannot.

The price of activism, My Son’s Story argues, is not only paid by the activist. It is paid by everyone the activist loves, and it is paid without being asked whether they consent to the payment.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — Gordimer’s most intimate novel: Will Sonny’s narration is among the most psychologically precise voices in her work, and the question the novel poses about the cost of public commitment has no easy answer.