In his career as a novelist, short-fiction writer, and essayist, Dan Jacobson once remarked, he had gone around the course twice. At this point in his prolific career it would be more exact to say that he has circled the course three times. In the 1950s he began publishing largely realistic fiction set in South Africa during the formative years of apartheid, incorporating in that fiction not only an evocative sense of place but also trenchant criticism of racial segregation and a prophecy of its future failure. In the early 1970s his fiction took a new direction into structural, thematic, and stylistic experimentation, producing self-reflexive and metafictional work that was set in locales such as London, biblical Judea, or invented countries with names such as Sarmeda or Ashkenaz. He continued, however, to write essays on South Africa, culminating in a lengthy travel book, The Electronic Elephant: A Southern...