Learning to Help

DO GOOD, by William Sayres. 253 pages. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. $4.95.

If there has to be a novel about the Peace Corps, this chuckler will do until something weightier comes along. Actually, Do Good is not precisely about the Peace Corps, since its hero, Peter Bradley, was rejected after six weeks of training on grounds of uncontrollable idealism. But he goes out on his own anyway, to a backward South American hamlet, to spread the gospel according to U.S. Government pamphlets. It is all rather disappointing. First of all. there isn't even a bridge around that needs repair. Moreover, he is shocked by native manners and morals. The village witch, who doubles as the town doctor, uses a potion called K85 to cure a man of a "bad wind"; the local church sells religious pictures cut out of old magazines; one of the local belles wears a dress made from a flag looted during a soccer riot in the provincial capital. But when he opens his ears, Peter finds that the villagers speak the peasant wisdom of the ages, and he finally settles down "to learn more about help--what it is and what it isn't."

Sayres, an anthropologist who has worked in South America, has a sure sense of irony that plays off innocence against experience. Occasionally the natives sound too much like jaded New York taxi drivers, but there is enough comic inventiveness there to offset the lapses.

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