BOOKS

By R.Z. Sheppard

WHITE PEOPLE

by Allan Gurganus

Knopf; 252 pages; $21.95

Allan Gurganus' popular 1989 Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All is an exuberant comic novel narrated by a Southern nonagenarian. Dixie whistles through the stories Gurganus has collected for White People, although the theme of the Lost Cause is rearranged for misplaced lives. The attitudes and manners of Gurganus' characters are small-town first and Confederate second -- even third. Similarly, the author's narrators are perceptive misfits who just happen to be gay. "I've got an extra tenderness. It's not legal," is the laconic observation of one homosexual who is attracted to a pornography fan. In the story Minor Heroism, an artistic child grows up under the disapproving eye of an emotionally remote war-hero father, a parent described forcefully as "sheer rock-facing."

The longest stories define a society "where ladies knew the names of other ladies' gardeners and maids and lapdogs," where people prize refinement and "whitish houses like Museums of Comfort." Red necks in these pages are likely to be the result of menopausal hot flashes rather than of exposure to the sun.

When Gurganus, who studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts as well as writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, reaches over the broad cultural horizon, we get the satiric sampler America Competes. The piece is an inspired and deftly arranged exchange of imaginary nut letters from folks eager to win a "National Fundament of the Arts" grant. The theme, "America, Where Have You Come From, Where Are You Bound?," is to be realized on the wall of a Washington office building. A Phoenix man thinks his father's handmade place-mat menus would be appropriate. Handicrafters from Ocala, Fla., urge a macrame snood over the entire building, and a Los Angeles atheist knows exactly what he doesn't want: depictions of Pilgrims on their knees, or any ethnically mixed group gazing heavenward. Our Founding Fathers were, he argues, "Europe's overflow of malcontents . . . drifters who were miserable elsewhere." White People reveals a once well-rooted folk searching for new and better places in which to be miserable.