Gordimer is no reformer; she looks beyond political and social outrage to the sad contradiction of the human spirit, which delivers to those in power an even worse sentence of pain than they themselves can pass upon their victims. For her, as for many writers since Conrad, Africa embodies in fearful and epic simplicity a diagram of the failures of civilization: an awesome balance of ultimate innocence and ultimate corruption. But for her the heroic scale of this antithesis is also familiar, unexceptional, often banal. She sees the complex nuances of irony in her black-and-white landscape and measures decay from virtue with marvelous exactness, by the inch. (p. 54)

The contaminated, debased contact between the races is central to several of [the stories in A Soldier's Embrace.] In "Oral History," a village chief, who lives in "a house like a white man's house," fails to understand how white men...