BOOK REVIEW : ‘Breaking Ice’ Also Breaks New Ground : BREAKING ICE: An Anthology of Contemporary African-American Fiction, <i> edited by Terry McMillan</i> . Viking: $24.95 cloth; Penguin: $10.95 paper; 690 pages

Let’s play a little semiotics on “Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary African-American Fiction.” It’s a 690-page anthology featuring 57 writers--most of them major. The anthology is edited by a woman. It doesn’t have any academic godparents--no advisory or editorial board--as does the upcoming “Companion to African-American Literature,” appearing soon from the Oxford University Press.

In the literary world’s terms, this volume is not exactly up there with Norman Mailer.

No, by the account of Terry McMillan, this volume’s editor, she was teaching writing up in Wyoming, fuming that so few of her students were black, that so few of the writers published in magazines and literary quarterlies were black (or African-American, as the name-change goes), and that the few African-American anthologies still talked about Langston Hughes as the latest thing. So she called her publisher to suggest that it was time for a c o ntemp o rary African-American Anthology. Then she solicited submissions.

And that’s where this wonderful book came from.

McMillan reminds her readers of Trey Ellis’ “New Black Aesthetic,” a belief system wherein “contemporary African-American artists now create art where race is not the only source of conflict.” At the same time, McMillan includes a seething preface by John Edgar Wideman, who questions how blacks can bend the up-tight, patriarchal English language to African-American concerns: “What’s the fate of a black story in a white world of white stories? What can we accomplish with our colors, feathers a nd horns, how can we fruitfully extend our tradition? How do we break out of the circle of majority-controlled publishing houses, distributors, critics, editors, readers?”

A Zen Master might remark: “Behold! They have done it!” The writing here is like fistfuls of jewels. It’s brilliant, sorrowful, funny.

Wanda Coleman glitters with “Lonnie’s Cousin,” in which dopiness, eroticism and irony combine. John Edgar Wideman’s own passages from “Fever” (“Victims in this low-lying city perished every year, and some years were worse than others, but the worst by far was the long hot dry summer of ‘93, when the dead and the dying wrested control of the city from the living”) recall a time in Philadelphia when black nurses and undertakers saved the city by administering to white and black alike.

Don Belton’s “My Soul Is a Witness” fictionally examines a moment in the life of that ex-Supreme we’ve heard so much about: how life in the stretch of a few minutes appears to her as an abyss, and then the first of her dinner guests arrives.

My favorite (and every one here is excellent) is Charles Johnson’s “China.” In a literature where several female “stars” have been criticized for talking trash about the shortcomings of black men, Johnson very gently and sweetly stakes out another position.

At first it seems that a wife, Evelyn, is to be the protagonist of this story. She’s been married to Rudolph, a docile postman, for more than 30 years. Rudolph has “high blood pressure, emphysema, flat feet,” and very low expectations. To get him out of his gloomy mood, Evelyn drags her husband to a movie, and in a preview of coming attractions, his attention is caught by a kung fu movie--can that man really fly?

The next thing Evelyn knows, her fat, sad husband has sneaked off to see the movie, signed up for lessons in the martial arts, changed his diet, found a new set of friends, meditates three times a day and recognizes that--even with all its limitations--the world is perfect, and he, Rudolph, dwells in the heart of infinity. That’s when Evelyn has to pull out her own big guns, because perfection and beauty in a man are intolerable to her.

This anthology comes in both hard and soft cover. If you can’t afford the one, you can surely buy the other. But to pass over this book would be like seeing the Hope Diamond in the street and being too darn lazy to pick it up. You’ll be a poorer person if you don’t buy this book. Trust me on this one!

Next: Ed Cray reviews “Lucius D. Clay: An American Life” by Jean Edward Smith (Henry Holt).