Miss Gordimer is a stylist, a gem-polisher who creates in the reader a sense of Katherine Mansfield's shimmering immediacy of image. Sometimes the gems are not worth the polishing; sometimes the style does not seem congruous, in the broad mural of a novel especially. Yet her gifts are so diverse, her range so astonishingly broad, her gallery of places and people so various, that one cannot speak of her world in a phrase, as one would say Faulkner's South, or Hardy's Wessex. Her nimble imagination and capacity for response move from the urban and suburban life of Johannesburg, with its political activism, its art and theater groups, to the meager thatched roof and mud floor of native locations; from the bored matron, to the cruel child, to the professional hunter.

The image of a bazaar comes to mind when one thinks of Miss Gordimer's variety and resourcefulness. The...