SOURCE: "Saboteurs," in London Review of Books, April 15-18, 1984, p. 23.

In the following excerpt, Clayton comments on Gordimer's writing style in Something out There.

Nadine Gordimer continues to send sane, humane reports from the edge of darkness. In her finest stories she fixes authoritatively the experience of her South African characters, who exist in the shadow of a gun. They are menaced by repressive laws, unpredictable violence and a cruel historical process; their small domestic treacheries can carry a fatal undertow of danger. In this latest collection [Something Out There] her tone remains cool, diagnostic, her brilliant camera eye unfazed. Even in a few pages she produces not a tentative sketch but a finished drawing. She places her figures exactly in the landscape, and the contrast between their precarious lives and her own controlled poise yields a high imaginative tension.

The education of a middle-aged, liberal-minded divorcee, Pat...