SOURCE: "After the Euphoria," in New York Times Book Review, September 25, 1994, p. 7.

In the following review, Bausch praises Gordimer's personal approach to social and political issues in her None to Accompany Me.

I read somewhere long ago that a good novelist is also a social historian; the operative word there is also. And while literary criticism, at least in the United States, has lately become more and more a kind of ersatz social science, where worth is judged according to social impact or a political agenda, one is always grateful for writers like Nadine Gordimer whose fiction is so often categorized as work of social significance, and who, when one actually reads her novels and stories, shows herself again and again, in the face of enormous pressures, to be insistently personal in her approach.

Ms. Gordimer is concerned, as all good writers are and always have been, with...