Our Take

Gordimer's great subject was always the moral life of white South Africans under apartheid—the self-deceptions required to sustain liberal identity within an unjust system—and July's People is her most concentrated treatment of it. By removing the Smaleses from the social order that defined them and placing them entirely within July's, she creates conditions under which every assumption they held about themselves, about him, and about their relationship can be examined without mercy. The novel is brief and almost unbearably precise.

What makes it endure is Gordimer's refusal to offer the Smaleses—or the reader—any exit. Their liberalism is genuine and entirely insufficient. Their care for July is real and built on a foundation they never examined. The novel doesn't condemn them so much as simply illuminate what they are, which is a far more uncomfortable experience than condemnation would be.

Readers who loved Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee or Born a Crime by Trevor Noah will find Gordimer in essential South African literary company. Also a powerful pairing with A Passage to India by E.M. Forster for readers drawn to novels that excavate the impossible intimacies of colonial relationships. Brief, essential, and not easily forgotten.