NONFICTION - Oct. 6, 1991

MEXICO: Some Travels and Travelers There by Alice Adams (Prentice Hall: $20; 240 pp.) Novelist Alice Adams first traveled to Mexico in the 1950s, and now goes on an almost annual basis. The uncanny thing about this anecdotal memoir is that she writes of her early journeys with the same informality--and vivid recall--with which she talks of a trip she took last year. Adams’ style is disarming; she begs to be read aloud, since so much of what she writes sounds like what she’d turn and say to a companion over a cup of coffee at an open-air cafe. Sometimes her style veers dangerously toward the superficial--a reflection on the poor children who sell Chiclets in the street, and their young mothers, is too glancing to do justice to the subject--but for the most part she is refreshingly frank about what she sees, and how she reacts to it.