A Sport of Nature<i> by Nadine Gordimer (Knopf: $18.95; 341 pp.) </i>

Nadine Gordimer’s career as a writer began about 35 years ago, with the publication of “The Soft Voice of the Serpent,” a collection of her short stories. She now has to her credit eight collections of stories and eight novels. Some of her work has been banned in her native South Africa. All of her work has been acclaimed and honored throughout the world.

Her extraordinary gifts were evident from the start: a precise ear for spoken language that lent great authenticity to her dialogue; a sensitivity to the rhythms and texture of the written word that gave her prose the power of poetry; a keen eye that made her a tireless observer; an even keener sense of social satire based upon her ability to see through appearances to the heart of the matter, and a strong feeling of moral purpose, composed in equal parts of her indignation at the sheer injustice of South Africa’s entrenched racial oppression and of her commitment to speak the truth as she saw it.

Yet, as Gordimer’s reputation has steadily and deservedly risen, there have been signs of falling off in her most recent work. The possibility that success is “spoiling” her is, frankly, unimaginable. It is possible, however, that success has isolated her--not so much from the realities of political life as from the kind of truly critical response an artist needs to gauge the effect and effectiveness of her work. It is also possible that the weaknesses afflicting her ninth and latest novel, “A Sport of Nature,” as well as some of the stories in her last collection, “Something Out There” (1984), are reflections of her deepening pessimism about the future of her country and a growing disillusionment, not only with liberalism, which she dismissed decades ago, but with all kinds of human endeavor from rationalism to radicalism.

Because Gordimer is a voice worth listening to, it is important, before going on to evaluate her latest novel, before giving vent to one’s own reactions, first to take account of what this book has to tell us. Gordimer begins with a definition of the book’s title, taken from the Oxford English Dictionary. The Latin term, we are told, is lusus naturae ; the meaning has to do with change. A sport of nature is a “spontaneous mutation” exhibiting “abnormal variation from the parent stock” and productive of new varieties.

The heroine of this novel is just such a “mutation.” She is the product of a “typical” South African Jewish family, given the name “Hillela” in memory of a Zionist grandfather, and brought up in the comfort of white bourgeois surroundings in the years following World War II. Yet, from the outset, she is something of an oddity: Her real mother, Ruthie, ran off with a Portuguese dancer from Mozambique when Hillela was still a baby, leaving Hillela’s nominal father free to attach himself to a lower-class restaurant hostess in then-Rhodesia.

Hillela, who fancies herself the daughter of the Portuguese, is brought up by her mother’s sisters, Olga and Pauline, who represent two types of white South African Jewry. Olga, married to a rich man, is chiefly interested in comfort, security, and the acquisition of paintings and antique furniture. She is a kind woman, who treats Hillela “like her own daughter,” but she has no interest in the problems of South Africa’s nonwhite population except insofar as the situation may affect her servants. Hillela’s other aunt, Pauline, married to an idealistic lawyer, is sincerely devoted to doing whatever she can to bring about a just, multiracial society. She, too, treats Hillela “like her own daughter.” In Olga’s case, that phrase means giving the girl all the material advantages; in Pauline’s case, it means trying to imbue her with a social conscience.

But neither Olga’s version of the good life nor Pauline’s vision of a better world appears to make an impression on Hillela. Hillela lives to please herself; she cares neither for convention nor conscience. She lives, we are told repeatedly, through her senses, motivated mainly by her sex drive. And even in this, she is passive: Men fall for her; she does not have to pursue them. She is presented as a veritable force of nature; a woman with the instinctive cunning of a cat, always managing to land on her feet.

Her early conquest of her cousin Sasha, Pauline’s son, shocks the family because of its incestuous overtones and sends Hillela out on a series of picaresque adventures with a series of different men in different countries: white and black, European, African and American, traitor and revolutionary. Yet, in committing the act with her almost-like-a-brother cousin, Hillela was not engaged in a deliberate attempt at subversion undertaken to outrage propriety, undermine family or make a statement: She was merely latching onto whatever was closest at hand.

Throughout her experience, she remains the same: cunning, seductive, adaptable, unreflective. She does not bother to distinguish between a sincere revolutionary and one of Pretoria’s spies. She does not feel the suffering of black South Africans until the black man she marries is gunned down in the kitchen before her very eyes. She becomes, nonetheless, an able advocate for revolutionary African causes, deftly manipulating diplomats, bureaucrats, politicians, and activists in Western Europe, the Eastern Bloc, and the United States. Her being white and Jewish is never held against her. Nor does she experience any problems because she is a woman: African men who generally hold their wives in low esteem are invariably impressed by Hillela and make an exception in her case. She triumphs, becomes first lady of an independent African state, and is an honored guest, along with her husband, at the inauguration of the new, black-run state of South Africa.

What are we to make of Hillela’s story, even if we are willing to accept its improbabilities? It can hardly be called a celebration of revolutionary opportunism, yet neither is it a scathing, Dostoevskian denunciation of the same. Gordimer’s attitude toward Hillela--and the other characters--is detached, distant, sometimes bitterly ironic. Yet, she also takes a grim satisfaction in the story she has chosen to tell--the satisfaction of someone proud to have swallowed a harsh, unpalatable potion in the belief that it is the strong medicine required. Gordimer would have us confront a bitter reality: The justice of a case does not ensure its triumph. But within this cloud, a silver lining--of sorts: Although morality may be of no avail, the mysterious, blind forces of nature and mutability will have their way, and a “liberated” South Africa is part of this wave of the future. Thus, change itself is the hero of this novel. Yet it is a change based not on choice but on chance. As a “spontaneous mutation,” Hillela may pass for a “free spirit,” but she does not exercise the kind of freedom associated with the ability to make moral choices. “Those who have choices have morals,” remarks one of Hillela’s lovers. “The others have no choice but to meet, after three centuries, violence done to them with a violence of their own.”

Not only Hillela, but all the characters are portrayed from a distance, with a superficiality that may be deliberate but that certainly makes them less than involving. They seem to have no interiors. Perhaps they are meant to be viewed as “types,” but, if so, they lack the mythic dimensions of archetypes: Instead of seeming larger than life, they seem smaller: not types, but putative specimens, glimpsed from afar with little sense of their reality. Hillela disappears, turns up in news items, reports, gossip, photographs taken in the company of the dubious political “celebrities” of our time. What she feels or thinks, we do not know. We constantly hear the refrain “Trust her,” meaning not that she is implicitly trustworthy but rather that she may be trusted to do all right for herself. Her black daughter, named after Nomzamo Winnie Mandela, is constantly referred to as “the namesake,” one of many awkward attempts at narrative irony. She grows up to be a high- fashion model: another unfathomable token face in magazines and gossip columns.

In casting Hillela as unheroic heroine of the struggle for freedom, Gordimer pays homage to the ironies of living in a “media age” where image prevails over substance. But, I think, this is needlessly trendy. From a novelist of Gordimer’s stature, readers may well expect more in the way of substance and critical perspective.

Sadly, this novel is as weak in purely literary terms as it is lacking in positive political wisdom. Not only is the characterization thin, but the prose is convoluted, dense--even rough at times, lacking Gordimer’s trademark diamond-hard brilliance and sculpted clarity. Perhaps, after all, it is South Africa that has finally done her in this time. In trying to confront the harsh reality of the present and to outrun in fiction the dangers that lie ahead for her country and its benighted peoples, she has simply fallen victim to the hugeness of her task. Gordimer took the title of her first novel, “The Lying Days,” from William Butler Yeats, and some lines of his seem to sum up her quest in this, her latest, novel:

The fascination of what’s difficult

Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent

Spontaneous joy and natural content

Out of my heart. . . .