The New Yorker: Fiction cover image

Tessa Hadley Reads Nadine Gordimer

The New Yorker: Fiction

CHAPTER

How to Write Political Outrage on the Page

Gaudamer is a kind of journalist or anthropologist and I think even in the way she uses tiny details like the idea that a 20 cent tip would be right for a colored girl and a black girl with only a 10 cent tip. Somehow the story feels to me like a way of writing about something you couldn't write about analystically but can sneak it in to a piece of fiction. It's really hard to express in relationship to this story because obviously in one sense yeah the moral of the story is not hidden  but somehow one doesn't feel that she's simply preaching or showing us something obvious.

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