[Stern is an Irish novelist, short story writer, translator, and critic. In the following review, he offers a positive assessment of Gordimer's Six Feet of the Country.]

In this her second collection of stories [Six Feet of the Country] (eight of the fifteen have appeared in The New Yorker) Nadine Gordimer's range is far wider, the observation even keener, than that shown in her volume The Soft Voice of the Serpent. The quality of the prose, the authority and intelligence behind it, are surely unsurpassed by any other writer in South Africa today. What Miss Gordimer's admirers may miss here, however, is the abiding compassion of her novel, The Lying Days.

In Six Feet of the Country the author's primary concerns seem to be twofold: the behavior—usually malicious, occasionally shocking—of highly sophisticated white South African women toward members of their own sex; and the dilemma of serious, liberal-minded white South African women whose lives have been warped by the gulf separating them from the colored people. Not all these stories are about South Africans. There is one ("Face From Atlantis") about some ex-Europeans who come from South Africa to New York, another of an American couple who went from New York to South Africa; and there are stories, it's true, about men, usually impoverished Central Europeans, who have emigrated to South Africa; yet almost all these stories are told from the female point of view—a view by no means complimentary to that sex, often less to the male.

The story that will interest those who have been waiting to hear how white Americans and Africans react to one another on African soil is "Horn of Plenty," one of the two stories in the collection that have not been published before. Like many of Miss Gordimer's white women, Mrs. McCleary was a narcissist as well as "a beauty." In New York, where before her marriage she had been a popular hostess, Pat McCleary had employed a Negro woman who had been more to her than just a servant. It was at Mrs. Wilks that Pat had "yelled when she was irritable and on whose crooked shoulder she had wept when she wanted some man she couldn't have." It took Rebecca, an illiterate African who as a servant did everything perfectly but nothing whatever unless she was told, to make the American realize that a Mrs. Wilks "was necessary to free one to live."

Brilliant as the stories dealing with South Africa's colored problem are, there is in this collection one story which concerns only white people and which could have taken place in any civilized country at any time. Appearing originally in different form in The New Yorker under the title "The Pretender," the story is now called "My First Two Women." In this reviewer's opinion it surpasses all Miss Gordimer's other stories in its simplicity and insight into human nature. The theme is the universal one of the child whose father has divorced his wife and married again. The pretender is the stepmother over whom the child, who tells the story in retrospect, realizes at the age of 5 that he possesses a power—"something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb." What the boy does with this power and what the stepmother is unable to do for all her awareness, decency and love, is a story that can act as a lesson to "progressive" parents as well as to budding authors who may be under the illusion that the working of a child's mind is simple, and as simple to describe.