Coming of Age

THE LYING DAYS (340 pp.)--Nadine Gordimer--Simon & Schuster ($3.95).

The heroine of this book is afflicted with a common ailment: growing up. Her ailment is aggravated by a special complication : South Africa and the drab gold-mining town from which she comes. The pains of adolescence are intensified by "the slow corrosive guilt...which, admitted or denied, is in all white South Africans," and by the fact that while the mine yields gold, the town offers only shale. Groping toward maturity, Helen Shaw supplies her own clinical study of her troubles in the first person singular.

At 18, she goes to the university at Johannesburg, meets a group of intellectual beachcombers and feels liberated from the shoals of convention. Soon she breaks with her family because they refuse to accept a black friend into the lily-white sanctity of their home. She moves into the apartment of a bohemian couple and from there to the arms of Paul Clark, "an enchanting talker" with a seductive face. She is happy because of "the intensity of my identification with living," and because her lover, who works for the Native Affairs Department, is "at grips with the huge central problem of our country in our time, something that had oppressed me not only in my intellect since I had grown old enough to have a concept of man's freedom, but in my blood."

At 24, she has seen a man killed in a riot, is disenchanted with the dangers of putting her ideal of freedom into practice, has fallen out of love and is escaping to Europe. "Where do people like us belong?" she cries. "Not with the whites screaming to hang onto white supremacy. Not with the blacks--they don't want us. So where?" But even as she leaves, she knows that she will return and that she has "accepted disillusion as a beginning rather than an end."

Like her heroine, Novelist Nadine Gordimer is a young (29) South African, and The Lying Days, her first novel, sounds as if it were filled with authentic echoes of autobiography. Novelist Gordimer has not yet learned how to bring characters to life, but she has skill in fitting words together and in expressing nuances of emotion. What she has to say may not be new, but she says it well and men of good will never tire of hearing it.

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