SOURCE: "Afterword," in Salmagundi, No. 62, Winter, 1984, pp. 193-96.

Below, Wieseltier discusses the effects of apartheid on Gordimer's black and white characters in "Something Out There."

"Each torpid turn of the world has such disinherited children, / to whom no longer what's been, and not yet what's coming, belongs," Rilke wrote in 1922, in a castle. In 1930, in a prison, a similar inspiration about the inconclusiveness of the modern age came to Gramsci. "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born," he wrote; and went on to add, in the manner of an intellectual, "in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear." In 1981 Nadine Gordimer, whose work has married lyricism to criticism in a way that tempts you to talk of greatness, chose Gramsci's sentence for the epigraph of July's People, perhaps her most representative fiction; and in a...