The Chastened American

THE MOUNTAIN ROAD (347 pp.)--Theodore H. Whife--Sloane ($3.95).

Hengyang, Kweilin, Tushan, Liuchow--the names fall like a dirge on the South China wind. The time is 1944, and the stench of burning Chinese towns masks the peaceful summer scent of oranges, persimmons and rice fields. With the Japanese armies at their heels, U.S. demolition teams mine the strategic airstrips with 1,000-lb. bombs gouging the good earth as they retreat. The irony is that they outrun the enemy but are runners-up to history.

Against this turbulent, doom-splashed setting, Reporter and Author Theodore H. (for Harold) White (Thunder Out of China, Fire in the Ashes) projects a well-crafted first novel. A June Book-of-the-Month Club co-selection, The Mountain Road combines a pistol-paced war story with the education of a quiet American major whose cultural reflexes are slower than his command decisions.

Possessed by Duty. Major Philip Baldwin is a rear-echelon engineer officer with a fever for field duty. He volunteers to command a seven-man demolition team whose main target is the twisting mountain road along which all vehicles, including his own and the pursuing Japanese, must travel. The road is an undulating mass of Chinese refugees moving in grim lockstep with fear, famine and misery. In their eyes, the Americans are the dei ex machina shielded from fatality by the jeep, the SCR-300 radio and the K-ration.

In Major Baldwin's eyes, China is what the world was to William James's hypothetical baby, "a big. blooming, buzzing confusion." In terms of U.S.-style efficiency, he regards the Chinese as nature's eternal amateurs. Author White portrays him as the last authentic American hero-type, the hero as old pro, the tough-minded man who does the best possible job under the worst possible circumstances.

The major lives by his creed. When a synchronous detonation of the Liuchow runway is foiled, Major Baldwin goads his bone-weary men through an unending night as they blow each bomb separately. When the men stand about in listless show-me skepticism, it is the major who mans the heavy air hammer to prepare a roadbed rock slide.

Possessed by Vengeance. Author White invests each episode with the bladed tension of a poised samurai sword. Though the Japanese never appear, they lurk menacingly just behind the last hill. The major's men achieve grace or disgrace under pressure, but, unfortunately, they are etched in bas-relief--nearly flat characters caught in symbolic or merely arbitrary poses. The book is even shallower when it tries to be most profound, e.g., in suggesting that the major is the compulsive victim of his self-corrupting power when he goes on an irresponsible shooting spree to avenge the killing of two of his men.

What lifts The Mountain Road well above such triteness is its driving cut-to-the-chase immediacy with never a flash-backward glance and Author White's familiarity with things Chinese, dating from his Harvard summa cum laude in Chinese history and his 1939-45 stint as one of TIME'S China correspondents. From scraps of lyric poetry to details of cuisine, from proverbs to folkways, he creates a poignant and pungent image of timeless China. The tragic casualty on The Mountain Road, Author White implies, is the relationship between the U.S. and the vast continental mass of China, two cultures once fingertip-close in friendship, destined by later events to draw back and ball their fists in bitter enmity.

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