Stained Glass Elegies, Shusaku Endo (Dodd, Mead:...

Stained Glass Elegies, Shusaku Endo (Dodd, Mead: $7.95). A 40-year-old man seeks out a “sorrowful myna bird” to help him through lung surgery; Japan’s war generation finds itself unable to protest, unwilling to fight; the post-war generation feels isolated and alone--the struggles in these short stories leave little doubt about why Endo has acquired a reputation among many in the United States as a somber storyteller. The heart of these stories, however, is largely optimistic. And, unlike dark Western fiction, in which characters often languish amid indifferent landscapes, the few stories that are black point the way toward sources of light--honesty, friendship, sincere religious devotion, human understanding, even humor. In “Old Friends,” the story about post-war isolation, human betrayal is assuaged by the benevolence of the individual; “A-40-Year-Old-Man,” the most gripping of this lot, creates a priestly figure in the myna bird, which forgives rather than condemns; “Incredible Voyage” makes fun of superficial devotion, but in so doing emphasizes the importance of spiritual essence and human character.

Endo preaches responsibility--his principle moral message is that “the actions of a human being are never self-contained”--but doesn’t demand perfection. In “A-40-Year-Old-Man,” the protagonist (whose experience with surgery is modeled after Endo’s own) is further encumbered by guilt over an affair he had with his wife’s cousin; his wife smiles knowingly, but won’t talk about it, and Endo remains sensitive both to the man’s need for silence and his wife’s need to engage in silent derision. Similarly, the protagonist of “My Belongings” becomes comfortable with values he has come to accept haphazardly; we need to embrace moments of chance and cling to them, Endo tells us, introducing a Buddhist vision into a work that also contemplates the relevance of Christian faith in Japan.

Originals: American Women Artists, Eleanor Munro (Simon & Schuster: $15.95). Visual artists might capture an image that suggests truth; through alabaster sculpture, plexiglass architecture or curled craft paper they might conjure up some clue to the Zeitgeist . But most are reluctant to let interpretation interfere with imagination. They pose questions without having answers. As Alice B. Toklas commented after a dinner party, “Gertrude (Stein) has said things tonight it will take her years to understand.” In these sometimes scintillating portraits of women painters and sculptors in 20th-Century America, Eleanor Munro at first seems to share the artists’ humility and lack of presumptuousness. Women in the visual arts have been far more conservative than their literary counterparts, Munro observes, not pioneering new forms as have, say, Stein and Virginia Woolf. Soon after a gracious preface, though, Munro posits that women visual artists are vital to society precisely because of their quiet conservatism. The “naturalist tradition” followed by most of the artists in this book, and exemplified in the work of Georgia O’Keeffe, has endured, Munro believes, while dynamic, male, “rational philosophies,” such as Modernism in art and Darwinism in science, have been eroded by “global wars and the traumas of the mid-20th Century.”

Because of their sensitivity to “process-in-nature,” women artists thus have a special place in society, for, as Munro sees it, the museum has come to stand for the cathedral, the art gallery for the chapel and (lest Munro worry) the critic for the evangelist. “People pay their respect to art,” she writes, “the way they once did to icons in their niches.” Clearly, Munro has mistaken the constructively passionate convictions of the artists she interviews for those of most Americans. But, while these artists might not be situated at society’s core, they are given a well-deserved place of honor in this rich book, which, while inaccurate as sociology, provides inspiring models for artists. As such, “Originals” is a decisive success, for Munro’s stated goal in her more humble preface was to inspire: “To show with what inner-directed commitment and sacrifice women artists kept to their goal long before success was a factor, and so possibly to offer models for other people (female and male) who find many of our society’s goals inadequate.”

Promised Land, Karel Schoeman (Summit: $7.95, paperback; $18.95, hardcover). In 1972, when Karel Schoeman completed this shadowy, futuristic novel about scared, bitter South African whites living on scattered farms under majority rule, resistance in South Africa seemed small and insignificant against the shining, mineral-based economy and smoothly effective system of social management. Cautionary rather than realistic, this novel’s warning went unheeded at a time when it could have done the most good. Since the whites in the country now have brought upon themselves a situation nearly as bleak as the one fictionalized in these pages, Schoeman’s prophecy no longer can be preventive (though this new edition seems to have been put to press in a hurry, given the numerous typographical errors-- though appears for thought twice in two successive pages, for instance).

“The Promised Land” should be welcomed back nevertheless, for, on a more subtle and less temporal level, it is a book about the costs of moral indifference, the ephemerality of childhood, and people’s ways of coping. Only Carla, the daughter of a couple living on a farm that once was an elegant estate, seems strong in will and clear in vision: “You’re trapped in the web of the past,” she tells George, this novel’s protagonist. “We must learn to live in the new world.” Carla’s strength, however, is won by cultivating a steely, inhuman coldness. George, in contrast, is one of many more vulnerable characters in this novel living “empty days of exile.” He lives in the past, dreaming of his mother galloping through the veld on a horse, her hair tossed by the wind, of a lofty sky and broad sea. Schoeman’s sensitive realization that George’s romantic confusion is more probable and human than Carla’s hollow heroism makes this novel more unusual than other cautionary parables about the protean land.

The Party Goes On: The Persistence of the Two-Party System in the United States, Xandra Kayden and Eddie Mahe Jr. (Basic: $8.95). Readers fond of Western European democracies will read the title and think that this book examines America’s anti-pluralistic, two-party system and its tendency to narrow the range of accepted political debate to a sliver. In fact, the authors--Xandra Kayden, a political scientist at Harvard, and Eddie Mahe, a Republican political strategist--are arguing precisely the converse. As they see it, “independent voters are a standing testament to the weakness of the party system.” Politics based on a broad range of “ideas and principles,” they write, can only lead to “a widespread loss of confidence in all institutions,” a cause of the “political turmoil” in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.

Compromise, consensus and commitment are, in short, requisite for a strong nation, the authors stress. “People may, and often do, start out in public life as issue advocates. The closer they get to the top, the nearer they get to the core of electoral politics, the more they become politicians: people who want to be part of the process and who use issues as chips that they move around as part of their bid to be included in the game.” Kayden and Mahe successfully demonstrate some advantages of strong parties--the more candidates rely on them, for instance, the less beholden they are to special interest groups, such as political action committees. But, as the authors admit, parties exist not to promulgate ideology but to sustain themselves, to seek power for its own sake. And not all readers are likely to agree with the authors’ premise that this special interest is in our interest.

NOTEWORTHY: Descartes’ Dream: The World According to Mathematics, Philip J. Davis and Reuben Hersh (Houghton Mifflin: $12.95). He dreamed of a world unified by mathematics, but not all intellectual matters can be dealt with rationally by logical computation, argue the authors in this accessible and original book from 1986.