In several of her novels—A World of Strangers, The Late Bourgeois World, The Lying Days and The Conservationist—Nadine Gordimer implies that the insulted and injured make substantial ghosts, haunting a society whose survival depands on the maintenance of insult and injury. Indeed, "He's dead but he won't lie down" could serve as an appropriate epigraph to much of her fiction. The South Africa she describes in affectionate, glowing detail is a country in which an abandoned corpse is a common sight…. That body by the roadside, waiting to be disposed of by the "proper channels", has taken on a frightening symbolic vitality—for Miss Gordimer, he is an underground man in more sense than one; he has staked a claim on the earth he will soon inhabit.

Over the thirty odd years of her writing life, Nadine Gordimer's vision has become bleaker and her art more...