SOURCE: "Alone, Obsessed, Outsmarted," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 3308, July 22, 1965, p. 609.

In the following excerpt, the critic highlights the theme of lonliness in Not for Publication.

Although Miss Nadine Gordimer's scene in her short stories is often South Africa, and her themes therefore often have to do with the colour bar, she is not an explicitly "liberal" writer: she nearly always writes of the best, the most humane side of her characters—even the thick-headed policemen who arrest the gallant Mrs. Bamjee for her anti-racialist activities in "A Chip of Glass Ruby" are decently abashed and sorry (as far as their natures will allow them) for what they have to do. Miss Gordimer's real theme is loneliness—the loneliness of all kinds of exile (of, for example, "free" South African Nationalists who are being trained in sabotage in a free republic, or of a German au pair...