SOURCE: A review of Writing and Being, in Women's Review of Books, Vol. 13, No. 4, June, 1996, p. 8.

In the following review, Milton comments on the themes of Writing and Being.

Nadine Gordimer is a writer whose moral vision predicates her literary one. The same could be said, to some degree, about any writer one would willingly read. But I see Gordimer's perspective on good and evil as being quite different from that of many, or even most, of the thinking writers of our day: Gabriel Garcia Marquéz, say, or Günther Grass or Doris Lessing, who are so burdened by the madness of contemporary society that they often need to break out of the confines of realism to give sufficient voice to their sense of absurdity.

By contrast, there is something almost old-fashioned about Nadine Gordimer: not only because she stays within the limits of exactness and reason...