DATE: Sunday, August 17, 1997               TAG: 9708070755

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY PHILIP WALZER 

                                            LENGTH:   87 lines

STRANGERS IN 3 STRANGE LANDS

EXILES

Three Short Novels

BY PHILIP CAPUTO

Alfred A. Knopf. 353 pp. $25.

Exiles collects three beautifully crafted novellas about clashing cultures, each of which could stand powerfully on its own.

Philip Caputo's protagonists in all three are strangers in a strange land - whether a different country or a different class. And their attempts to fit in often end in tragedy or heartache.

``Standing In'' begins with a chance encounter on a train between Greer Rhodes, a wealthy Connecticut matron, and Dante Panetta, a Florida hair stylist who is a virtual double of Greer's dead son, Clay.

She is looking for a stand-in son; he is looking for a new life. So, in a bizarre but convincing turn, he moves into her mansion to start over.

She gives him entree to her country club - and pays for tennis and sailing lessons. Her husband, Julian, gets him a position that could lead to a broker's job. He starts dating a woman from the club who describes him as ``suitably unsuitable'' for her.

Dante is tantalized by the chance to ``become someone else. He didn't yet know who that would be, only that it would be a new and more estimable self.'' Greer relishes the opportunity to have another son to dote on and manage - one so similar to Clay, yet free, in her mind, of his imperfections. (Clay was gay.)

But in striking images, Caputo portrays Dante's growing doubts about assuming a life not his own. While posing for a photo, dressed in Clay's military uniform, Dante ``had the unsettling sensation of not recognizing himself; the still more unsettling sensation that his very identity was somehow being drawn out of him, soaking through the uniform with his sweat, evaporating into the cool spring air.''

The other two novellas occur in foreign lands, where Americans try to mold not themselves but the inhabitants.

``Paradise'' ostensibly revolves around the mysterious arrival on a remote Australian island of a stranger who may have broken the law.

David MacKenzie, the American expatriate who runs the island, senses ``the aura of an evil more complex and menacing than the evil of a simple roughneck.'' Uncle Elias, the wise old villager, also suspects the newcomer: ``That young pella did not speak true.''

But the underlying story is the struggle for control of the island, the attempt by white leaders like MacKenzie to change the lives of the black fishermen who live there. MacKenzie's job, as an ``economic missionary,'' is to show them how to make a profit. But despite all his preaching, he sees ``the young men lolling around the village when they should have been fishing.''

Elias warns him: ``You been runnin' around, tryin' to change tings all onetime, yellin' at these pellas to get to work, they ain't gonna lissen you.

Both their fates are intertwined with that of the stranger, who shows his true colors in a dramatic conclusion. It is a skillfully layered work, marred only by the portrayal of Elias, who falls too close to the stereotypical all-knowing patriarch.

``In the Forest of the Laughing Elephant,'' perhaps the most gripping of the three novellas, is set in Vietnam, where Caputo served during the war. A Rumor of War, his memoir of his time there, first gained Caputo literary notice. Caputo was a Pulitzer Prize-winning Chicago Tribune reporter before he turned to fiction.

Four American soldiers and a Vietnamese hunter set out on a mission - not to ambush the North Vietnamese but to conquer and kill a tiger who carried off their mess sergeant.

The tiger is Vietnam, the war, the ``other.'' And the soldiers' views of the animal - beauty, beast or both - reveal the true measure of their character.

Caputo deftly conveys the grotesqueness and violence of war with images and scenes - a leper colony, the murder of a priest - far from the theater of battle. And he keeps the tension to the level of a thriller as the men stalk the tiger.

Lincoln Coombs, the soldier extraordinaire leading the charge, thinks: ``If he could see just a few feet farther he would have a split-second edge; but the night wouldn't yield an inch. All right, then, let the cat spring straight at him out of that blackness. He would kill it point-blank in the middle of its leap. It would be a pleasure to see it bleeding at his feet, to watch the serene light go out of its amber eyes. . . . Its roar, dreadful and unearthly, blew the silence into fragments.''

The ending here, like the others, seems stunning yet inevitable. This is a winning collection. MEMO: Philip Walzer is a staff writer.

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