Crack

March 3, 2014
This somber portrait of the apartheid regime’s impact on one white couple from South Africa-born Radmann (Held Up) begins on Jan. 1, 1976, several months before the Soweto Uprising. Pregnant housewife Janet Snyman lives in a suburb of Johannesburg with her policeman husband, Hektor-Jan, and their three young children, Pieter, Shelley, and Sylvia. Hektor-Jan works as a police interrogator, barbarically torturing arrested black “terrorists.” The police are determined to find and confiscate hidden arms caches belonging to anti-apartheid groups in order to preserve the status quo. Janet, when not practicing for her part in an upcoming local production of Brigadoon, oversees the activities of the couple’s black live-in housemaid Alice and gardener Solomon. She’s disconcerted to discover a crack at the bottom of the family swimming pool but decides not to tell Hektor-Jan about the problem, waiting until it gets much worse and then asking Solomon to repair it. When Doug van Deventer, the Snymans’ creepy next-door neighbor, who is a voyeur and gossip, sees Janet directing Solomon’s work, he mistakenly assumes that they’re having an affair—a mistake that has bloody consequences. Radmann has crafted a scathing literary condemnation of apartheid and its dehumanizing effects.

June 15, 2014
A corrosive tale of life in the waning years of the apartheid regime, when a thousand assumptions are shattered as white privilege declines.Housewife, mother of three "silver darlings" and eminent cocooner, Janet isn't entirely oblivious to the world outside, but when a crack appears in her swimming pool, ominously, on Jan. 1, 1976, she tries to contain the damage to her backyard and her interior life. That's not so easy to do, given that life beyond the gates is clamoring to make itself heard. Even so, when, later, she takes her black gardener to the hardware store to get materials to patch the crack, she's dimly surprised that he's ordered to stay outside, as if the country beyond her garden wall is a foreign land. Even her husband, a policeman whose "fingers were the size of fists," can't turn back history. Yet Janet keeps trying to shelter herself and her family from a changing South Africa, even as the crack grows more noticeable-and, as it does, becomes ever more a part of her psyche, so that she can feel the gardener's insistent brush "scrape her very insides like she was the pool and nightmare was about to spring loose." As Radmann moves his story along, it's increasingly clear that Janet's determined myopia is a defense mechanism that helps her escape the bruising injustices of her society, injustices her husband is more than instrumental in delivering. Janet is a haunted, anxiety-ridden soul, and her worries lend Radmann's book a claustrophobic feeling. Still, despite occasional bouts of staccato overwriting-"It was the need. The need nudged her. As needs must."-Radmann's story holds up well. And though the symbol of the cracked swimming pool as metaphor for the disintegration of both a nation and a marriage is perhaps too obvious, Radmann works it judiciously.The novel is without the seething indignation of firsthand chroniclers such as Gordimer, Brink and Coetzee, but it succeeds in conveying a sense of how life under political evil works-or doesn't.

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March 15, 2014

Set in 1970s South Africa just before the Soweto uprising, this novel begins as a domestic drama but gradually turns horribly sinister. Janet, a pretty, white housewife with three children and another on the way, becomes obsessed with a crack in the bottom of the family swimming pool. Although dependent on her black maid and gardener to keep the household running, she is in complete denial about the country's racial tension, a denial that extends to her Afrikaaner husband Hecktor-Jan's police work: Janet believes he's been promoted to an administrative position, but in fact he spends his nights torturing black prisoners. When she and her gardener join in repairing the pool's widening crack without telling Hecktor-Jan, Janet sets off an interfering neighbor's suspicions. Told mainly from Janet's viewpoint, the novel grows increasingly hallucinatory as Janet and most of the other white adults around her lose their grip on reality. VERDICT This is more than an extended metaphor on apartheid as madness, as Radmann's use of remarkable detail and vivid, sometimes grisly imagery redeems the story from mere allegory. For all readers of serious fiction.--Reba Leiding, emeritus, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA

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