SOURCE: "Her Region Is Ours," in The New York Times Book Review, August 24, 1980, pp. 7, 18.

Mojtabai is an American novelist and critic. In the following review, she overviews the themes and plots of A Soldier's Embrace.

We paid attention when Nadine Gordimer's most recent novel, Burger's Daughter, was banned in her native South Africa. At once, this distinguished author of seven novels and eight volumes of short stories, whose work has sometimes been patronized as cool, quiet, regional, had a wide and receptive audience. Now that the ban and the attendant publicity have been lifted and Miss Gordimer resumes her work of scrupulously sifting the life around her, of discriminating, clarifying, connecting, I wonder—will we continue to listen?

I truly wonder, when so much of our current American entertainment (fiction included) seems a surfeit of unreality, given over to sensationalism or flights of escape—to commerce with dragons...