The Chastened American

A SINGLE PEBBLE (181 pp.)--John Hersey--Knopf ($3).

The clash of strong cultures is likely to be a god-eat-god affair. Each may conceive the other as strange, wrongheaded, downright wicked. An individual caught up in such a conflict sees himself as a missioner to the heathen, clad in the righteous armor of the sole truth, his own. In this compact novel of grace and distinction, John (Hiroshima, The Wall) Hersey captures the essential pathos of such culture struggles, seeing them as encounters between two goods rather than between good and evil. In A Single Pebble, a story set against the backdrop of the China of three decades ago, the West's Promethean spirit of change collides with the East's age-old piety of tradition, and both lose.

Chinese John Henry. The book's hero is a young American engineer scouting out possible damsites on the great Yangtze River. From the moment he boards the 102-ft. cargo junk that is to take him upriver from Ichang, he feels irritably caught in a vise of passivity. Once under way, the American is alternately fascinated and repelled by the work of the "trackers," human beasts of burden whose yoke is a bamboo rope, who haul the junk from precarious footholds, step by straining step. Chief of the trackers is a Chinese John Henry nicknamed Old Pebble. Old Pebble is a kind of mythic Nature Boy who can chant his weary men through a rough gorge or leap into the treacherous waters to unsnag the towline and break surface with it like a trout.

Unnerved by the river people's fatalistic fortitude and inexplicable joys, the American takes to his bunk with a psychosomatic sort of fever. There, Su-ling, almond-eyed wife of the junk owner, feeds him broths plus the harsh poetic lore of the "Ten-Thousand Mile River." Once well, the engineer excitedly spills hints of his company's plan to harness the river, tame its power, eliminate the backbreaking tasks of the trackers. Su-ling is horrified at the American's impiety in even thinking of tampering with the sacred Great River, and begs him to breathe no word of it to Old Pebble.

Murder in Effigy. With a perfect damsite in view, the American forgets his promise and tells of his hopes. In Old Pebble's view, the engineer has cursed the junk, and murdered the river in effigy with his plans. And to the American, Old Pebble is an annoying boulder in the path of progress. The two are locked in their petty feud when the river takes an awesome hand in its own destiny, leaving the American chastened and wiser.

Author Hersey, born in Tientsin in 1914, raised in China for the first ten years of his life, conjures up the flowering mists, brooding mountain masses and gorge-shadowed surfaces of the Yangtze as if from a child's vivid book of memories. Equally vivid and enlightening is the image of two cultures once fingertip close in friendship, destined by later history to draw back and ball their fists in sad and bitter enmity.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.