SOURCE: "The Art of Sympathy," in The New Republic, Vol. 208, No. 26, June 28, 1993, pp. 30-4, 36-7.

Appiah is an English-born American critic and educator who has written extensively on philosophy, literature, and African culture. In the following largely positive review of African Laughter, he discusses some of the major themes of Lessing's work, namely her depiction of "the moral intricacy of human life."

Early in African Laughter, Doris Lessing recalls a childhood visit to her brother's colonial school:

Everything was clean and tidy and there were green English lawns. I felt alien to the place. This was because I was alien to the English middle class, playing out its rituals here, as if on a stage. I knew even then they were anachronistic, absurd and, of course, admirable in their tenacity.

It is the last phrase, the sting in the tail, that alerts you that this is Lessing, not...