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Africa of late has seemed like nothing but bad news: famine to the north, apartheid to the south. It is easy to forget that behind the headlines life goes on there pretty much as it normally has, although what passes for daily routine on the continent may strike outsiders as magical or malign. This paradox shimmers through the six stories in Whites, Norman Rush's first book. His fictional characters live in the real Botswana, a small country sharing an uneasy border with South Africa. The arrival of black rule has ostensibly diminished the power of the British and Boers who remain, although hardly anyone, white or black, recognizes much change. What proliferates is vignettes of crossed purposes or misunderstanding between the races, with outcomes that may fall anywhere from tragedy to farce. In Bruns, a zealous Dutch do-gooder campaigns against a local tribe's rough justice, the tradition of whipping malefactors, and he outrages the whites by blaming such violence on them. Nearly everyone would like to see him go, but the method he chooses for his departure guarantees considerable disruption for those who stay. In Near Pala, two white couples drive through a desolate landscape and talk, mostly about race. The wives are sympathetic toward blacks, the husbands decidedly not. Their Land-Rover approaches three black women, one of them carrying an infant, who are pleading for water. What happens next is not the stuff of the nightly news but rather, like all of Whites, a haunting glimpse of individuals in the grip of passions and history.
MEN'S LIVES
by Peter Matthiessen
Random House; 339 pages; $29.95
This handsome and passionate volume is a knowledgeable and wholly absorbing elegy to the dying trade of commercial fishing, as practiced by a few hard- handed natives of Long Island's South Fork. Author Matthiessen, himself a professional fisherman off the high-rent beaches of East Hampton and Montauk before he went on to write of the snow leopard and Zen enlightenment, traces the rise and fall of fishing there from the earliest years of white settlement. The accents of the "Bonackers" -- the nickname comes from Accabonac Harbor -- still echo the Dorsetshire and Kentish usages of Elizabethan times. Their work is brutishly hard and ill paid, and death by drowning is a probable price of carelessness. They are beset by a powerful lobby of sport fishermen and by environmental regulations that have shut down striped-bass fishing, in part because of PCBs. Some persist anyway, and Matthiessen admires men who "value independence over security . . . protective of their freedom to the point of stubbornness, wishing only to be left alone."