Here though she never labors the point, she convinces us that the very lives of the white residents of this scornful, deeply insulated community are hanging by the thinnest of threads. It is Miss Gordimer's best book. Not many authors in her field accomplish what she sets out to do with so much force and grace. But when I showed this novel to a South African exile, the son of an imprisoned African leader, it made him unhappy. Our sympathy for her people is directly proportional to the appeal of their arguments.
Most outsiders bring to Africa an imported rhetoric, and most insiders have a rhetoric to export.
July's People' is Nadine Gordimer's projection of what it will be like if or when the time comes for the whites to leave Johannesburg. This quality of subversion, this deliberate use of banality in order to disturb, is what sets Miss Gordimer's version of the Beast myth apart. Out There' concentrates, by contrast, on the minutiae of the real world. The art lies in the refusal of all exaggeration, all hyperbole.