SOURCE: "Gordimer Is in the Details," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 6, 1991, pp. 2, 10.

In the following review, Roraback notes the freshness of the themes in Jump, despite their familiarity.

Nadine Gordimer takes you by the hand. Sometimes she leads you gently. Sometimes, impatient, she yanks. Come, she says, there are things I want you to see.

We've been over Gordimer turf before. We know the field is not level. As always, there are salients of insensitivity, injustice, inhumanity—apartheid. After so many tours, can there be something we missed?

There can. There is [in Jump]. Our cicerone knows where the real stuff is—new insights, apercus, epiphanies, buried under layers of complacency. She knows where to dig.

As the conscience of the white South African, Gordimer could be expected to pause here and there to pontificate. Instead, in the best African tradition, she favors the role of...