Little to Learn From Intermarriage Tale : LOVE IN BLACK AND WHITE; The Triumph of Love Over Prejudice and Taboo, <i> by Mark and Gail Mathabane,</i> HarperCollins, $20; 256 pages

One of the authors here, Mark Mathabane, is a black South African. His first two books, “Kaffir Boy” and “Kaffir Boy in America” have done very well in this country.

In his first volume, Mathabane made his literary name and performed a very useful social service by laying bare the awful living conditions of the South African black.

But from the time he was in his teens, Mathabane’s life was hardly typical. He was spotted by Stan Smith, the tennis player, plucked up from his dreadful poverty and, after sundry adventures and exceedingly lucky breaks, was transported to New York, where he went to a good university and began to write “Kaffir Boy.”

He also met a beautiful blond woman, Gail, whom he eventually married. This volume is the story of their difficult courtship and equally difficult interracial marriage, and the events that transpire when you bring children of mixed blood into the world.

This must have been a hard book to write, and it’s a very hard book to read. The critic is faced with a real dilemma. To suggest that “Love in Black and White” is a failure is to set oneself up as a racist who doesn’t believe in true love. To suggest that it is a success is to commit a crime of felony lying. To say that one Mathabane writes better than the other is to be a mean-spirited creep.

There is even a typo in the uncorrected draft that suggests the section “Gail’s view” might have been written by Mark.

This is a story that has to be taken for what it is, if you can just figure out what it is! “Love in Black and White” is studded with a minefield of technical problems.

The narrative looks simple enough: Sweet and lonely Mark is living in “International House” studying, working out, trying to make a place for himself in America. Beautiful Gail lives there too. They meet, are attracted to each other, fall in love, and then they begin to live in Second Thought City.

Remember, this is nonfiction, and both the Mathabanes have plenty of living relatives. When Gail’s father decides to divorce her mother, Gail refuses to see Mark, her beloved, for five months. Why? We’re never told .

When Gail tells of her initial attraction to Mark, she has to remind readers that she is thin, beautiful and popular--this, to counteract the stereotype that only fat, ugly losers fall in love with blacks. (But who even suggested that such a stereotype exists?)

The language here, particularly the dialogue, is stilted beyond description. When Mark explains why he loves Gail, who stood by him when he was still obscure, he declaims: “I think it would be foolish to abandon, in the name of racial solidarity, friends who stood by my side in hard times.”

At some points the book seems truly schizophrenic: Mark tells us his life was “transformed” by the “joy Gail felt as a mother-to-be,” but then he goes on for 10 more lines about how much she vomits.

And earlier, Gail explains her hesitations about their liaison in these words: “ . . . Everyone in my family seems to know what’s best for me, and I know I feed their malleable image of me with my words, my timid smiles, my hesitations, my silences.”

Do people talk like that? I never heard one.

Perhaps the real problem is that the Mathabanes implicitly pass themselves off as a typical interracial couple whose struggle might serve as an example of strength to others. But Oprah Winfrey brought the entire Mathabane family over to America to be on her show! Mark plays tennis with the celebrated Stedman, Oprah’s mythic boyfriend, and Gail serves Stedman lunch.

Do you think Gail would ever descend to some kind of human response like: “Ohmigod! Stedman’s coming to lunch! What am I going to make?” No, Stedman shows up, sits down, delivers a droning discourse on interracial marriage, and leaves.

The Mathabanes appear to have become their cause. They don’t talk. They issue position papers. This book will no doubt be useful in college classes--the rage of black women about Gail is particularly enlightening--but in terms of art, structure, wit, ingenuity and characterization, this is dreary stuff.

Life has to be more than a matter of “black and white.” It has to be a matter of being human, and alive.

Next: Constance Casey reviews “Mothers and Daughters” by Elena Bonner (Alfred A. Knopf).