SOURCE: "On 'The Concealed Side,'" in Chicago Tribune Books, November 5, 1995, pp. 6-7.

In the following review, Graham describes Gordimer's artistic ethos as outlined in Writing and Being.

This collection of Nadine Gordimer's recent Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University [Writing and Being] offers six lucid and interconnected essays on fiction that should be read by every serious reader and writer. Throughout this slim yet intellectually hefty volume Gordimer—the distinguished South African novelist and Nobel Prize winner—succeeds in elegantly explicating her hard-won artistic ethos, a moving and fluid blend of personal discovery and commitment to the wider world.

Gordimer's first essay, "Adam's Rib: Fictions and Realities," explores with a wry eye the persistent desire of some critics and readers to play the game of "I Spy": trying to discover who a fictional character "really" might be. Such an endeavor is, of course, quixotic, for even...