SOURCE: "A Novel of Hope and Realism," in The New York Times Book Review, April 4, 1982, p. 7.

In the review below, Romano celebrates the classical emphasis on human truths and values of Ah, But Your Land Is Beautiful.

Alan Paton's first novel, Cry, the Beloved Country, is one of the few works by a contemporary writer one would risk calling a classic; in the case of that novel, published in 1948, the word has a rather specific meaning. The idea of a classic is historically bound up with the view, powerfully embodied in Paton's book, that there are certain perdurable human truths and values, immune from geographical or historical vitiation. The classical view, with its Judeo-Christian modifications, acknowledges that we are flawed, but not therefore ignoble; the classical view is famously realistic about our limitations, but celebrates our sense of possibility and the idea of hope. Indeed, the one ignoble...