Come to Africa and Save Your Marriage: AND OTHER STORIES by Maria Thomas (Soho: $14.95; 235 pp.)

Maria Thomas’ Africa is a paradox of suffering and eerie beauty. Over its red-dust plains, people wander in search of food while tourists consume fish burgers in its cities. At night, black skin seems to disappear; ghosts bicycle on rutted roads. On an empty beach, love is “luscious . . . sweet and juicy,” while virgin reefs shelter deadly things: fire coral, sting rays, poisonous sea snakes.

“Come to Africa and Save Your Marriage,” Thomas’ first story collection, focuses on American travelers and expatriates, most of whom blow onto the Continent with all the force of a hurricane. Their subsequent efforts have about as much impact as the brief rains on the relentless African heat.

The reasons these people have for choosing Africa are as diverse as the characters themselves--a poetry teacher, a Peace Corps volunteer, a painter, a shell collector. They come, they believe, unselfishly, to “teach” Africans, or to “save” Africans. Or they arr1769366816marriage or a failed career will blossom again in exotic soil.

What they share is the context in which their dreams, and their well-honed identities, made sense. In the United States, they were clean, well-educated, articulate. They were practiced at self-protection.

In Africa, they lose their bearings. Stripped of language and custom, they miscalculate. Their arrogance cuts them off as the heat squeezes their secrets out with the sweat from their pale skin.

Yet for those willing to learn from Africa, to throw off cultural bias and venture into new terrain, Africa illuminates. In the title story, a wife takes a Tanzanian lover who heals and inspires her, even as her marriage dies. In “Second Rains,” a foreign-service secretary who dreams of little but retirement suddenly “blooms, as though nature had surprised her . . .,” when she impulsively marries an Ethiopian.In Thomas’ vision, the ability to love, to connect with a fellow spirit rather than “the starving masses,” is crucial to healing the rifts that perpetuate world suffering.

In the best of her stories--those like “‘Summer Opportunity,” in which a black Mississippi girl is sent to Nigeria as an International Development Intern--Thomas handles her theme with a vivid naturalism that dramatizes human progress amid the hit-or-miss quality of life’s events.

Occasionally--but only occasionally--the artifice shows through, as in “Shellers,” when the attack of a sea creature brings a complex sibling rivalry into abrupt and unrealistic focus.

Otherwise, Thomas’ judgment is unerring. Her losers are so lost as to be almost unbearable: the drunken wreck of a mother in “A Thief in My House”; the overzealous agronomist in “The Texan.” Nor are her winners necessarily more likable. Yet their sudden turnings toward light, often inexplicable in their own minds, are deeply satisfying moments because of the risks Thomas takes as a writer.

Her evocation of a tiny Mississippi swamp town is as lively and richly colored as her teeming Dar es Salaam. Her ear is fine-tuned to the mixed melodies of speech. She has a gift for creating palpable context and then turning stories loose in it.

Thomas, author of the much-praised novel, “Antonia Saw the Oryx First,” believes in the power of narrative to reconcile contradictions and make mysteries comprehensible. Her 14 stories make a luminous case for her position.