SOURCE: Smee, Sebastian. “All Over the Place.” Spectator 292, no. 9122 (7 June 2003): 45.

In the following review, Smee derides the prose style of the stories in Loot, finding it inferior.

Nadine Gordimer's lazily allusive and unkempt prose style makes most of the stories in her new collection, Loot, a pleasureless slog. This is Gordimer's tenth collection of short stories; the first, Face to Face, was published in 1948. In these latest, casually tossed off fictions, she still displays a natural short-story writer's feeling for the intimate moments and quiet epiphanies that can alter people's lives. And in several of the better stories here she either contrives neat conceits or homes in on genuinely interesting relationships. But when one has to wade through sense-jamming punctuation and pointless asides to uncover these virtues, one begins seriously to doubt whether the effort is worth it.

Several of the stories in Loot—including the title story...