[Mortimer is a Welsh novelist, short story writer, and critic. In the following review, she terms Selected Stories a social history of South Africa and praises Gordimer's use of the milieu in her stories. ]

South Africa, in the latter half of the 20th century, is an anomaly that incites more frustrated, personal indignation than any other political society.

There, on the tail of the vast black continent of Africa, sits the Union, authoritarian, racist, wealthy, implacably thickheaded, smugly disregarding every liberal principle and every concern for what we consider to be common humanity. We demonstrate, sign petitions, refuse to buy canned peaches; not altogether trusting the South African authorities to censor our work for us, we impose a cultural boycott, depriving the bastards of our tepid little intellectual plays until—presumably by means of other, more persuasive methods—they have seen the democratic light. South African writers consider it an honor not to be allowed back to their homeland. Secure in their exile, they talk a great deal and take up mysticism or feminism or Christian Science fiction—anything real, you understand, anything truly relevant to "the situation."

In the meanwhile, a very few extraordinary people (they must, one feels, be extraordinary people) continue to live and work in South Africa, stubbornly trying to tell us the truth. Of these, Nadine Gordimer is undoubtedly the most eminent. For over 30 years her novels and short stories have flowed steadily from the darkest tip of the dark continent, apparently fearless, her attitude, a unique blend of irony, compassion and disgust. The stories in this new collection were written between the ages of 20 and 50, and have been selected by Gordimer herself to show her development as a writer; but that is not all they show. A society, too, can age and sharpen and grow less amenable over 30 years.

. . .[Selected Stories] is, in its way, a work of social history: beginning with an elementary black and white encounter (the black is an ignoble, clumsy thief; the white, a woman full of the confusion and panic and aggression of the very young or very ignorant) and ending with the bitterness and disillusion of middle age ("We white friends can purge ourselves of the shame of rumors. We can be pure again. We are satisfied at last. He's in prison. He's proved himself, hasn't he?"), it spans a period of time in which nothing, except the fact of apartheid, has remained constant.

The 31 stories in the collection are taken from five books, and my own favorites are those that show Gordimer at her most receptive, wry and sunny, with a trained eye for the natural beauty of land, and water and an impartial ear for complaint, wherever it comes from—stories from the active, mature years, perhaps, in the middle of that 30-year marathon. During this time even her impatience with "dogooders," white liberal benefactors, is tempered with affection.

In "Which New Era Would That Be?," which seems to me the most successful of them all, we meet the young white social-rehabilitation worker, so sure of herself, with her "big, lively, handsome eyes, dramatically painted, that would look into yours with such intelligent, eager honesty." "It's hard to be punished," she says earnestly, "for not being black." Deranged by altruism, people do say such things.

Even Jake, who had been sure that there could be no possible situation between white and black he could not find amusing, only looked quickly from the young woman to Maxie, in a hiatus between anger, which he had given up long ago, and laughter, which suddenly failed him. On his face was admiration more than anything else—sheer, grudging admiration. This one was the best yet. This one was the coolest ever.

"Guilt, what-have-you ... "

the poor girl mutters, trying to explain why she voluntarily lives in a black (at this point in history called "colored") slum—and Maxie, "the small, dainty-faced African in neat, businessman's dress . . . shrugged, as if at the mention of some expensive illness he had never been able to afford and whose symptoms he could not imagine." In relatively few pages this story crystalizes a vast, seemingly unmanageable conflict, reducing it in size if not in stature, to the insoluble problem of human inability to communicate. Because it seems insoluble, it still seems hopeless; but Gordimer's sympathies here are so alive, her reactions so sharp, her aim so accurate on every target, that one feels exhilarated by new and significant knowledge.

There are a number of other memorable stories in the collection, though none of them, to me, displays the dispassionate passion of this one. The isolation of one timid, sensitive woman at a rowdy philistine party in "The Night the Favourite Came Home"; the odd, perverse excitement of the crocodile hunt in "The Gentle Art"; the picture—a Happy Snap out of focus—of healthy middle-class kids having healthy middle-class fun in "A Company of Laughing Faces"; the puzzling heroism and beauty of Mrs. Bamjee, "the ugly widow with five children" in "A Chip of Glass Ruby"—in all these Gordimer has been inspired by her belief that "an imaginative writer must not allow a political bias to intrude in the creation of characters—because the whole value of writing should be its dispassionate view. The injustices will come through."

Not a didactic writer, like Solzhenitsyn or Doris Lessing, Gordimer stays at home and writes about what she sees and hears and feels. The middle-class suburbs, the seaside resorts and vacations in the country, the teen-age mores, the conflicts of sex and background would be much the same as in any other WASP community if it weren't for the one thing that makes Gordimer stand out above her contemporaries—South Africa, her context and her content. Without this, she would probably belong in the ranks of those sensitive, perceptive writers of limited experience and no more than adequate talent. There is no point in trying to disassociate her work from the sorrow and the pity, the pain and the bitterness, that is her bonus for the life she has chosen to live and write about; there is no disguising the fact that one's admiration is greater for the act of writing than it is for the writing itself. Nevertheless, the plain, informative style—only very rarely touching the sublime, but only occasionally lapsing into the ridiculous—serves her material well. A more poetic or stylistically perfect prose might, against the enormity of her subject, seem almost indecent.

And the injustices do come through, loud and clear. We should be grateful; we should be troubled; and, somehow we should do something in return.