Word: reader
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...plot and cuff the culprit. Highsmith simply ditched the civilized pretense of justice avenged. She tore the final, comeuppance chapter out of Ripley's story, left him giddy with triumph--and let him flourish in four more books. The snake, having shed its old skin, slithers away; the reader is both shocked and pleased. Crime pays...
...truisms rather than incisive commentary. Of course, in two or three of these selections, we do get some flashes of the uncompromising clarity of moral vision that is apparent in her best fiction: but these glimpses of Gordimer at her best only serve in this context to accentuate the reader's disappointment in the rest of the compilation. In 1959: What is Apartheid?, a transcript of a seminar given in Washington DC, we see the Gordimer who we know and admire. Her prose rings pure and true, like good crystal: simple and clear, but heavy with a kind of unexpected...
...Instead, there is a miasma of literary criticism and historical analysis: in both genres, Gordimer chooses summary over insight. In References: The Codes of Culture making fun of the title would be shooting fish in a barrel we come to the hardly surprising realization that There is no generic reader, out there; in Our Century, Gordimer is a long distance from shocking us with the information that The mushroom cloud still hangs over us, and the unbearably trite corollary question: will it be there as a bequest to the new century...
...great thing about Gordimer's fiction has always been her success in stripping away the layers of pretense and denial and dishonesty that are built up around contemporary lives and societies. She shows the reader universal truths that are nonetheless elusive: her talent is to unveil revelation. In the nonfiction in this volume, it is Gordimer's practice to reveal truths that are painfully obvious to most anybody. The subtitle of the volume is Notes from Our Century, and Gordimer makes a case study of historical progress out of her native South Africa, taking us from the world of apartheid...
...Gordimer herself begs pardon, in this collection's first essay: nothing I write in such factual pieces will be as true as my fiction. What is appropriately important to her is emotional truth, words that somehow resonate inside the reader. Hemingway used to assure himself that if he could write one true sentence, he was on the right track: it is this kind of truth that is meaningful to the writer of fiction, truth to the spirit. The problem is, this is also the kind of truth that needs to be important to the writer of the kind of nonfiction...