Sheila Kohler, The House on R Street, 2025, Open Road, New York. (Photo: Supplied) 
In the opening scene of The House on R Street, a girl in a green school uniform steps from the shadows of a well-off, stuffy, dusty house into the light of the garden. The dim European interiority of the house is contrasted with the bright, unrelenting sunlight of Africa. The stultifying atmosphere of suburban life in Johannesburg in the late 1920s is contrasted with the flourishing, neglected garden, which, at the far end of the property, includes the servants’ quarters.
The narrative quickly draws us into the central character’s heightened, vibrantly coloured experience, her scathing views of her family and their bourgeois life, and her secret life, idolising Rudolf Valentino in the cinemas and hooking up with random men in town. Bill is a teenager whose real name we never learn. (A tomboy, she hates her girl-name.) Indications pile up that the story is about a crisis in her adolescence. She is engaged in an energetic, disordered challenge to her world of segregationist suburbia.
The world against which she is rebelling still thinks of itself as English. This is seen in the hallowed routines of the day’s meals, when the family are all together at the table but there is seldom conversation. It is seen in their possessions – cabinets of crockery, the ticking brass clock, the heavy colonial furniture. It is seen in the clothing – the heavy suits, the light dresses, the girls’ high school uniforms with sun-faded panama hats. It is seen, too, in the sense that genteel life occupies a timeless present.
Behind the shutters, though, shafts of light punctuate heavy shadows: the story gradually reveals a pattern of quite eccentric family life. The family are together only at meals and seldom anywhere else. There is the charity-case uncle who thunders on about the Boers and keeps budgies, the distant father whose job entails something in diamonds, the mother always delicate and ill, the childish but hardly naive sisters, the imposing live-in nurse in whose room father dallies at the end of the corridor, the creepy doctor who pacifies the indolent mother with commonplaces and pervs at her rebellious daughter.
The stage seems set for a worthy coming-of-age novel in a recognisably South African mode: a sociological context, a rebellion against it by a talented “sport of nature”, her discovery of the iniquity of the world beyond and, possibly, her engagement in the Struggle of those who are truly oppressed. But this expectation is subverted and then turned on its head as we learn more about Bill and her family.
Caught between agency and passivity
As regards the family, each is a colonial type, to be sure, but each is, equally, a character in their own right caught between agency and passivity. The father plays his role as breadwinner, but complains about not being able to make ends meet and is unable to manage his daughters. The mother owns the house, in fact, but has withdrawn sexually from her marriage and emotionally from her daughters, and despairs at being a burden. Left alone to interest themselves in life, the girls play rough pranks on each other and indulge in sexualised games.
This is not a “normal” settler family, blithely energetic and conscious of a civilising mission. Mother]s eccentric attachment to a little Buddha and her string of rosary beads suggest a woman who isn’t hidebound by English protestant proprieties. Her close relationship with the old Zulu servant is colonially shaped, but at the same time deeply intimate, as we see when he bathes her in the evenings. He attends her with a punctiliousness and tenderness he offers no one else. Their lives are caught up in each other.
More generally, the family is only two generations deep, and yet the household culture seems so old, as if the strain of maintaining a colonial identity has aged it prematurely. Eccentricity is a luxury of leisure, and the family is eccentric in ways usually associated with long-established middle classes. Within this, the adults are caught up in the finalities of their disappointments and accommodations.
The children, meanwhile, seriously neglected, live in a fantasy world suspended between the dark, unspoken secrets of family life and the energetic City of Gold, just a tram ride from the house. Bill’s younger sisters spend most of their time in the garden, or in their shared room, which is still called the “nursery”. The girls are hardly affected by their schooling, the main institution of their segregated world. Bill, in particular, avoids school as much as she likes. The assertive nurse tells the doctor that the children ought to be taken into care.
All of this and more is the context of Bill’s mounting challenge to the constrictions of her world. A central motif sees her repeatedly leaving the house, running for the tram and riding it to the city. In one of those moments she sees the houses of her neighbourhood: “their wisteria-covered stoep, their polished red steps, their pebbled glass doors. She thinks of the privies in the back.” She thinks of the “shotgun passages that lead from the front doors to the back”.
Old conventions
In her family’s house on R Street the old conventions are loosening their grip, leaving Bill to explore her world unobserved by family. Caught up in their own dusty dreams, the parents appear not to know that their oldest daughter is seldom at school, and often in town, eating ice cream, seeing a silent movie, cruising for an encounter. Often she sees the same film, starring a suave moustachioed hero of the silver screen. He plays a horseman of the Wild West and represents a girlish ideal of manhood.
Her ideal, though, she knows, is a fantasy. At home, bored or frustrated, she indulges in acts of cruelty and self-harm. On a whim, she kills Uncle Charlie’s budgie. She thrusts her sister’s head into the privy, the domain of “the witch”, an archetypal horror figure for the girls. She impales her foot on a garden rake. She alternately adores and taunts her invalid mother. Out in the light, she trades sex with men she meets in town or at Zoo Lake. These interactions are pragmatic and clinical, the men a stream of barely individual exemplars of a basic need. And back at home again, she induces an abortion.
Seen like this, the novel might still be a middle-class morality tale. But the power of the novel is in its uncompromising female interiority. Everything is experienced from Bill’s perspective, which bursts with capricious energy, is scornful of her old world, and observes the passing scenes of her life with cool detachment, all at the same time. She’s a girl looking for trouble, and the story is about her finding it. The central drama, her relationship with her mother, is played out in moments of tenderness and dismissal, and culminates in a truly shocking act – about which, we learn at the end, Bill has no remorse.
Kohler consistently frames her writerly project as giving voice to silenced women. She has applied this paradigm in personal biography and historical fiction – including her work on Charlotte Brontë, Freud’s Dora, and Madame de la Tour du Pin. Yet within the broader traditions of women’s writing, Kohler challenges therapeutic or confessional modes of exploration. As a writer, as a teacher of writing, for Kohler, literature is not simply testimony but aesthetic transmutation.
Aestheticised psychology
Kohler approaches gender questions through what has been called aestheticised psychology rather than programmatic ideology. At a crucial point in Bill’s challenge to her world, for example, we see her, “the girl in the green uniform”, in the shade of the cinema marquee, listening to the sounds of the city around her – cars, wagons, footsteps on the pavement. It is at this point, high on her Valentino infatuation, that she embraces amoralism. Her story of rebellion becomes one of pathological individuation, and the terrible pain that she incurs on her family as a consequence.
South African literary studies have paid little attention to this author, and even less to this fine novel. There are important questions here regarding the claims of so-called “transnational” South African literature. As Kohler notes: “I was very lucky growing up in such a beautiful world – South Africa, with so much sunlight and deep shadow, and with such a contrast between the beauty of the landscape and the acts of the people who inhabited the place.”
This formulation – beauty and horror coexisting – captures the moral complexity that characterises her fiction, and enriches South African fiction. DM