[Selected Stories] is full of pondered, significant details, the symptoms of [the] dementia—the bureaucratic and social combinations that make everybody ill, white and black alike. The stories are not all about race relations and the stresses they place on people who suffer, enforce, try to mend, or even to live with them; some are about the restricted lives of the whites themselves, their self-imposed and paralyzing mental suburbanism. Gordimer splendidly observes the remnants of persons beneath the repulsive stereotypes, an imaginative effort paralleled by her view of Africa itself, its extraordinary beauty showing through the obscene mess that has been dumped on it. So here … is a fiction of protest; and here too the sense that the truer the protest the more certainly it will end in death….

Gordimer is always an artist, within but never of the society she writes about. After holding this difficult position for so long she is able, in her preface, to speak interestingly about it. It was as a woman, she says, that she most belonged to the culture into which she was born: "Rapunzel's hair is the right metaphor for this femininity: by means of it, I was able to let myself out and live in the body, with others, as well as—alone—in the mind." Thus, she claims, she was able to achieve solitude without "alienation," two conditions she wants to distinguish, while remaining aware of "the serious psychic rupture between the writer and his society that has occurred in the Soviet Union and South Africa, for example…."…

She is, I think, by nature a short story writer, and some of the best things in the novels are episodes "held" in the manner of the story; for example, the seven pages in The Conservationist describing a furtive sexual adventure in an airplane. The stories lack the heavy self-consciousness that occasionally oppresses the reader of the novels. But by and large Gordimer's work, never raucous, always subtly considered, gives one the sense of an educated imagination focusing on the exemplary issues her intelligence presents to it; it includes and transcends the world of constriction and distortion. (p. 43)