THE BUNGALOW

Freed here continues the story of Ruth Frank, begun in the excellent Home Ground (1986): Ruth's South African Jewish childhood now behind her, she has married lovelessly and returned from New York on a solo visit to see her parents after her father suffers a heart attack. Unhappy with her husband Clive (he's also South African and Jewish, now a biomedical researcher with no desire ever to return home), Ruth has found her parents older, seedier, more marginal than ever—but prone to the same passionate hatreds and desires that their theatrical life has encouraged over the years. She visits her sister and wealthy brother-in-law and sees them terribly uneasy with the decaying privilege they inhabit in a country fast becoming scary, unsafe, anarchic. In unconscious response to all this entropy, Ruth drifts back into the orbit of Hugh Stillington—her very first lover years before—an aristocratic, maimed liberal now living in a seaside bungalow that seems like the last outpost of grace, fervor, and ideals. Their affair recommences—and is cut short when Hugh is murdered, leaving Ruth pregnant and defiant: she'll stay on. Freed is a terrific writer—and in Ruth has an appealing character of alertness and sensitivity to exile and community—but there's not much dramatic tension here. As sharp as the portraiture is (Freed can write a crowd or party scene as well as anyone today), Ruth's chronicle of plight, decision, and process of reconsideration moves along at a slower, more deliberate pace than the quick-tempo prose does, and, ultimately, the effect is not a happy one. Still, Freed fans may not care especially, satisfied enough with the very humane, high-grade novelizing that's here.