A Review on Lynn Freed’s The Bungalow Novel

Abstract

Ruth Frank, the narrator of Freed's critically acclaimed Home Ground, has grown up in this appealing novel. She married and settled in America, she returns to South Africa after her father suffers a heart attack. She is 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. There, she resumes her youthful romance with Hugh Stillington, a reform-minded landowner from a prosperous family of sugar barons. Ruth is an outsider belonging neither in America nor in the country of her birth. Only in Hugh's bungalow does she experience the ``keen sense of being in the right place.'' But when Hugh is murdered, leaving her pregnant, Ruth is forced to confront her sense of displacement. Ruth is a compelling heroine whose experiences shed light on white South Africa and its assumptions about race, class and belonging. And while the political turmoil of that country occasionally surfaces in a passing reference to Sharpeville or when an Indian writer is imprisoned for his views, the real story--like that of the biblical Ruth--is one of personal alienation and belonging.