The ironies that surround the liberal point of view in a multiracial society have been a persistent theme in Nadine Gordimer's work. In A Soldier's Embrace,… Southern Africa remains the setting, with one exception. There are a number of reasons, however, for finding the mixture not quite the same as before….

[The] "natives" of her early stories became first "African" and then later "Black". In her view, this last term is singular in being the only one which has not been imposed from above but has been chosen by the black people themselves. (More probably, though she doesn't suggest this, it was copied from the United States.) On one level her writing can be seen as the most sensitive record we have of the various shifts in attitude—breaths, rather than winds, of change—as they have occurred in South Africa throughout the past forty or so years. But the point of view is more limited than this suggests. Although she asserts that all writers, considered as writers, are androgynous, we see her world most clearly and movingly as it affects women, especially good-hearted young girls. Again, in spite of a formidable detachment, we are always aware that it is the point of view of an insider….

A hard-won humanism is characteristic of these stories of an inhumane society. But they are also very selective, which is what one wants to suggest by saying that they are the stories of an insider. The outsider, of course, is likely to see only caricatures….

But Nadine Gordimer has no time for such banalities. She works in a different field, almost resembling that of Frances Taver, the protagonist of "Open House", one of her most acutely ironic stories: "Frances Taver was on the secret circuit for people who wanted to find out the truth about South Africa." In Frances Taver's case the truth, "the real thing", means a meeting with black Africans. Unfortunately, under the tougher apartheid laws of the 1960s, Frances can only provide introductions to time-servers, phoneys, black collaborators with the régime. To the visitor from Washington, however, it is all the same….

With the reader, there is the feeling that a particular society has been described with too much particularity: certainly some of Nadine Gordimer's early stories tended to be loaded down with evocative detail….

As a result, the effect of the narrative was somewhat muted. After the scene had been meticulously set and a number of characters described and established in their setting, there would be a sudden heightening of language, until the story concluded with a little swirl of rhetoric, like the tail of a fish disappearing into deeper waters.

Such writing was impressive because it belonged to its time, to the 1950s and early 1960s, when novelists aimed at responding to people's general curiosity about life, and were supported in this by critics like Lionel Trilling. A Soldier's Embrace reminds us of how far we have come since then. There is no longer the sense of being briefed by an expert. Yet the growth of a self-regarding narcissistic attitude, the effect of the "Me" generation on much modern fiction, has left few traces on the life portrayed here: even Maxine, the girl drug-addict, is still pathetically full of concern for and involvement with other people. Nevertheless, the formalistic concerns which are at present fashionable may have left their mark on the technique….

When the physical world is evoked, it is presented with more economy than was previously the case as when the two soldiers embrace the lawyer's wife….

There seems to be a rule that the shorter a piece of prose, the more precise and accurate the writing should be. It is hard to feel that this is the case here with two brief experimental pieces, "A Lion on the Freeway" and "For Dear Life". Both are written in the sort of semi-poetic paragraphs which seem better in French than in English….

It seems likely that writers force themselves to develop, less because of a desire to alter the range of their subject matter, than because of boredom with the techniques which have gone to the making of their previous work. Since Nadine Gordimer published her early stories, there have been a great many changes going on: there has been Borges, and Nabokov. Even the expression "a New Yorker story" means something rather different from what it used to. Nevertheless, there is something rather discouraging in experiment for experiment's sake. In the end one must register a strong preference for the direct, almost bald, narrative of a story like "Town and Country Lovers", not only because it goes straight to the relevant emotions, but also from the suspicion that it is so much harder to bring off successfully.