SOURCE: "Gordimer Confined," in The Village Voice, Vol. XXV, No. 38, September 17-23, 1980, p. 40.

Gornick is an American nonfiction writer, editor, and critic. Below, she offers a negative assessment of A Soldier's Embrace, describing the stories as "fragmentary" and the collection "unsatisfying"

Nadine Gordimer's work—like that of a good doctor trying to find out where it hurts—applies steady pressure to external circumstance until the live places beneath the surface stir with surprised feeling. Gordimer has written seven novels and as many volumes of short stories, all set in her native South Africa, mainly in and around middle-class Johannesburg. Her knowledge of the politics of her country is strong and her sense of the politicalness of life profound, but her power resides in the force of sexual feeling that permeates her work and makes of racist South Africa a metaphor for the stunning sorrow of caged and harnessed...