FICTION

TRUCK STOP RAINBOWS by Iva Pekarkova , translated from the Czech by David Powelstock . (Farrar, Straus, Giroux: $22; 278 pp.) If Jack Kerouac had been born a generation later, and been Czech, and a woman, and had no Dean Moriarty to drive him around, “On the Road” might have turned out something like “Truck Stop Rainbows.”

The conformity that the Beats rebelled against in 1950s America is nothing compared to the grey pall that hangs over 1980s Czechoslovakia, where Iva Pekarkova’s heroine, Fialka, hunts desperately for “rainbows.” She avoids marriage, shuns Communist Party careerism and, on the sly, photographs plants deformed by industrial pollution. Her chief joys are conversations with her platonic friend Patrik and “serendipitous” affairs with the drivers of the trucks in which she hitchhikes back and forth across the country.

A crisis comes when Patrik is stricken by multiple sclerosis. The health-care system can’t provide him with a wheelchair. To pay for one, Fialka prostitutes herself with the international truckers who pass through Czechoslovakia on their way to the Middle East. But the price of hard-currency earnings is steep. Her previously innocent sport turns tawdry; her prized individualism curdles into selfishness; the once-admired West seems as spiritually empty as the East has always claimed.

Pekarkova (who came to the United States in 1986 and, her publisher says, now drives a cab in New York City) devotes much space to assailing a system that no longer exists, which makes “Truck Stop Rainbows” seem a little overlong. But she has humor and bite and the Czech gift for lyricism, and Fialka is a good character--sexy and tough and, despite a certain self-absorption, smarter than any of those bozos who rode with Kerouac to hell and back.