Books: Sex on the Veld

TOO LATE THE PHALAROPE (276 pp.)

Alan Paton—Saunders ($3.50).

One night a small-town cop in South Africa got drunk and took a black woman into the bushes. This, in plain words, is the subject of Alan Paton's second novel, Too Late the Phalarope. However, as readers of his first novel well know. Author Paton does not write in plain words. The prose in Cry, the Beloved Country sounded to some like the language of a very gifted high-school senior who has cried Tom Wolfe once too often. To others, especially to those who were not...