Current & Various

NOT FOR PUBLICATION AND OTHER STORIES by Nadine Gordimer. 248 pages. Viking. $4.95. South Africa is a land where blacks live in a limbo constructed by whites. In earlier novels and stories, Nadine Gordimer has coldly exposed the tensions of life along that hypocritical boundary. Her home country remains the setting for most of these 16 new stories, but the setting has become incidental; the characters are caught in emotional suspensions that have no geographical limits. Gradwell, in The Pet, hates the bulldog kept by his white employers: "Symbol of all the white man's savage glee in turning the black man from his door." But the dog is something of a misfit himself: he refuses to bark at strangers, ignores the bitch brought around for mating purposes. He is indeed a great, slobbering, sheepish failure "always conscious of wrongdoing." Hate turns to sympathy, as Gradwell recognizes his kinship with this other outsider: "He broke off a piece of bread and threw it, saying in his own language to the dog, 'Here!' " Miss Gordimer's detachment competes with her lapidarian skill. Her stories glow, but with the gem fire that gives no warmth and sheds only reflected light.

THE FLY by Richard Chopping. 291 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $4.95. On the jacket of this book squats a huge hairy fly--no doubt attracted by the offal inside. There is Mrs. Macklin, a black widow in sweaty corsets, who works days as caretaker of a dreary British office and prowls the night looking for someone to take care of her; Mr. Gender, an amorous Prufrock with boils; Miss Jeacock, a withered office virgin who lures a young clerk to the ladies' room and ecstatically dies of a surfeit. The clerk flees the jakes in horror but is blackmailed by Mrs. Macklin, who wants him for herself. But he cannot face the supreme sacrifice she demands and winds up in a catatonic state in her broom closet. By profession, Author Chopping is a commercial artist--he designed the dust jackets for Ian Fleming's James Bond books. His eye is microscopically keen. Unhappily, it is riveted on the Excremental Vision.

GOD BLESS YOU, MR. ROSEWATER by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 217 pages. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. $4.95. "God damn it," says Eliot Rosewater, custodian of what was once the 14th largest fortune in the U.S. ($87,472,033.61), "you've got to be kind." He is that almost archetypical American figure, the do-gooding sad millionaire, and he embellishes restrooms with melancholy graffiti: "If you would be unloved and forgotten, be reasonable." His heart smolders with love for the unlovable--volunteer fire men, science-fiction writers, the entire population of Rosewater County, Ind., his ancestral seat. To them, he disburses much money and all of himself. Author Vonnegut casts Rosewater as a misbegotten saint in a world that puts saints to the stake. Beyond that point lurks another: that goodness ought to have its head examined for trying to coexist with evil. In this book, his sixth, Vonnegut clearly establishes his kinship to the late Nathanael West, and Eliot Rosewater could easily pass as the reincarnation of Miss Lonelyhearts. But Vonnegut is both riper and less mature than West--and less angry. Able to observe detachedly above the world's fray, he has not enlisted in the cause of either good or evil, but he can find endless amusement in their collision.

THE KIMONO MIND by Bernard Rudofsky. 283 pages. Doubleday. $5.95. "What shall we make of the Japanese--at once geniuses and copycats, aesthetes and vulgarians," whose "politeness is as exquisite as their rudeness, their wisdom often indistinguishable from stupidity?" Author Rudofsky, an architect, designer and museum director, spent two years searching for an answer to his own question. He did not quite find one, and his route took him past many of the familiar inscrutabilities of an island where the kimono is dismembered before laundering, where the men wear long underwear in summer and in winter peel off their overcoats to bow to a friend, where the women surrender trolley seats to boys and rank no higher than condiments at table, where dinner ends with soup, and the guests, invited for eight o'clock, arrive at six or ten. But the Rudofsky tour is conducted with such irresistible charm, wit, grace and style that the reader is inspired to affection, if not understanding, for the enigmatic Japanese. The book is profusely illustrated with old woodcuts and drawings that handsomely convey "the aroma of the Japanese cultural climate," which was the author's purpose.

THE ENCLAVES by Felix Bastian. 230 pages. Doubleday. $4.50. If there is something intrinsically funny in the figure of a Hungarian refugee who teaches European history in a New Jersey parochial school for girls and is also a sex fetishist, then this is a funny book. If there isn't, then it is not. The author of this unruly goulash prefers to remain anonymous; Felix Bastian is a nom de plume.

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