THE GRASS Is SINGING (245 pp.)Don's LesslngC rowel I ($3).
Many an English middle-class family, caught in the business end of the economic nutcracker, has been dreaming of a freer, easier life in South Africa. Novelist Lessing, who was reared there, has bad news about their dreamland. Her story describes the spiritual defeat of a misfit couple in their war with the harsh realities of the veld. Few writers have succeeded so well in getting its thorny unkindness and its head-splitting heat down on paper, and few have written more devastatingly about the dream of living an easy European life against the...