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Richard Eder The Evolutionary War MY SON'S STORY vulgar, shopworn, commonplace of sticky traps. "My Son's Story" continues on these two levels of voicing. They, tell what has happened to Sonny, on the one hand. On the other, they provide through Will a kind of Greek chorus of anguish seeking to understand and define Sonny as father and as public figure; and himself as son and moral heir. The blond, Hannah, is an anti-apartheid worker who had met Sonny visiting him in prison.

She is an idealist and a descendant of missionaries, and at first their friendship was abstract, a fiery discussion of ideas and strategies. In contrast with Aila, the disciplined homemaker, keeper of the private world, Hannah represents for Sonny the larger world which, as a black man, he had been denied. There is something else, too. Upon his release, Hannah had written him: "I know you'll come out happy for battle." The phrase transforms Sonny. For this meditative man, action had been a self-denying extension of thought.

Now it takes on the dangerous aspect of joyf ulness. The affair is passionate and profound, but it turns Sonny into a ghostly, abstracted figure in his home. Will is a silently accusing presence there, unable to confront his father openly over what they both know. And outside, in the Movement, it weakens Sonny's position bit by bit. It allows his rivals to put his dedication in question.

Gradually, he becomes a peripheral, decorative figure; even the police lose some of their interest in him. At the same time, just as he had largely left his home, his home now leaves him. First his daughter, and then Aila without telling him join the resistance. The flighty young woman and the quiet homebody take on roles far more important than his. Hannah, despite her anguish at leaving him, accepts a refugee job in Addis Ababa.

Sonny fades into the background, still dedicated and dignified, but with the joy in eclipse. As a novel, "My Son's Story" can be schematic and prosy, particularly when Sonny and Hannah discuss their political and moral situations. The stridence of Will's voice is dramatically effective, but it becomes monotonous in its aggrieved questioning, which continues almost to the end. At which point, rather arbitrarily, he announces his intention to become a writer. It seems a self-conscious device.

But the evolution of Sonny from teacher to man of action to man of passion, and back into partial retreat, is rounded and moving. Hannah and Aila, though less fully seen, are, each in her own way, memorable and distinct. What is most memorable is Gordimer's ability to suggest the complexities that go with South African change; the mountains, which, as the Haitian proverb says, lie beyond the mountains, the unforeseen routes that lead through them, the dead ends that block the routes. Sonny is entangled, precisely, in the partial advances made against apartheid. Had the movie theater not been desegregated, he would not have been there to be caught by Will, and Will would not have been there to catch him.

If the ban against interracial relationships had not been relaxed, Sonny and Hannah never would have allowed themselves to begin an affair. Nor would they have been able to spend nights at her home, or go to hotels on weekends. And Sonny, whose gift is for speaking rather than conspiracy his shunting-aside was due in part to his inability to keep up with Movement politicking would not have been able to achieve his fulfillment and influence by going from place to place to address semi-tolerated meetings. To voice the new complexities that are replacing the older simplicities in South Africa, irony is required along with the traditional anger and hope. "My Son's Story" uses its irony with an energy and nerve that are themselves a kind of hope." By Nadine Cordimer (Farrar, Straus Giroux: 277 pp.) The uprooting of a giant tree can cause a prodigious and painful disarrangement of the bits of life that have learned to live pressed down in the earth it stands upon.

Even when it is a gallows tree. Nadine Gordimer's writing has been devoted to showing the deadly and deadening damage of apartheid in South Africa. In her gravely ironic new novel, apartheid has loosened and begun to teeter. And a pure-hearted black schoolteacher, who has fought it hard, will be painfully displaced in the first frail freedoms he helped to win. Sonny is a fine-spirited, graceful man who rose out of an artisan family to educate himself and teach English in a community outside Johannesburg.

He and Aila, his wife, make a private decency, for themselves and their children amid the public degradation of the racial laws. They cultivate their garden and wait. But the times move. A black child is killed; the students in Sonny's school demonstrate outside, despite the alarmed protests of principal and teachers. Sonny, his classroom empty, realizes that individual cultivation has become an absurdity.

He helps his students correct the grammar and spelling on their posters. "When you want to tell people something you have to know how to express it properly. So that they will take you seriously," he tells them. It will be his standard. Prom this first action, he moves to join demonstrations, to address them, and finally, to be taken into the anti-apartheid movement as a prominent figure and, above all, as a brilliantly rational public speaker.

He is jailed and he comes out a hero confirmed, as Gordimer wryly tells us, by the unique power of the authorities to choose the people's leaders by persecuting them. Gordimer portrays this modest hero in quietly graceful prose. But a shocking voice keeps interrupting. It belongs to Sonny's son, Will, who has played hooky one afternoon, gone to the movies, and met his father coming out, accompanied. Sonny rages: "She is blond, my father's woman.

Of course. What else would she be? How else would he be caught, this man who has traveled so far from all the humble traps of our kind, drink, glue-sniffing, wife-beating, loud-mouthed capering and all the sophisticated traps of lackeyism, corruption, nepotism If he is to be caught, of course it's going to be by the most 2 Win a Few, Lose a Few THE SAFETY OF OBJECTS By A.M. Homes (W. W. Norton: S17.9S; 173pp.) LITTLE NIGHTMARES, LITTLE DREAMS By Rachel Simon (Houghton Mifflin Seymour Lawrence: 212 pp.) Reviewed by Amy Hempel A teen-age boy is out on a date with his sister's Barbie doll.

Barbie is drinking a Diet Coke and complaining about Ken "He's always there waiting, and I'm like, Ken we're friends, okay, that's it" in a voice that is "a cross between the squeal when you let the air out of a balloon and a smoke alarm with weak batteries." Before returning Barbie to his sister's bureau top, the boy cannot resist putting the doll's entire head in his mouth, leaving teeth marks around her neck. Barbie's incensed reac- tion to this "typically male" behavior? "You're all the same. You're all Jack Nicholson." A. M. Homes (the A is for Amy) establishes and adheres to her own logic in "A Real Doll," one of the wonderfully skewed stories in her first collection, "The Safety of Objects" (she also is the author of an extremely appealing novel, Homes is confident and consistent in her odd departures from life as we know it, sustaining credibility by getting the details right, as when the boy offers Barbie "a piece of a piece of gum." Both Homes and Rachel Simon, in her first collection, "Little Nightmares, Little Dreams," offer similarly preposterous scenarios in several of their stories.

With Homes, one is happy to go along for the ride; however, with Simon, you'll want to think twice before climbing aboard. Homes opens her collection with "Adult Alone." A Westchester couple, Elaine and Paul, pack the kids off to Grandma and give themselves over to 10 days of dissipation. After the porno video and overeating, after a run-in with the police, Nintendo on the home screen and spilled wine in bed, they get the idea from a television special on crack. "When the report is over, they are quiet for a minute, uncomfortable, and then he turns to her and says, 'I think I can get Elaine returns home from errands the next day to find six vials of crack on the dining room table. "Is that a lot or a little?" she asks before they have at it.

This suburban escapade is followed by "Looking for Johnny." There is not a misstep in this difficult story of the kidnaping of a 9-year-old boy. Its effect depends, once again, on Homes' getting the queasy details exactly right. The kidnaper, Randy, insists on calling young Erol "Johnny." The man doses the boy with medicine to make him sleep; when it makes Erol Johnny sick, Randy suggests, "A Fig Newton might work. I'm not a cookie person, but Fig New-tons aren't really cookies, they're more of a medical food, you know?" Randy arranges real boy activities for the two of them a fishing trip, splitting wood, poker he even tries to teach "Johnny" to drive. The brutality in this story is not the obvious kind.

Homes instead introduces the more interesting case of a kidnaper who is disappointed in his captive. "A kid like you should have more to say," Randy says. "You should be nonstop, filled with ideas. It's like you're not all there." This criticism taps into facts of the boy's family life in a way that lets the reader see the blueprint for a lifetime's damage. "The Bullet Catcher" echoes Frederick Barthelme, with Suburban Man struck dumb and desperate, made weak by the lusty, empowered teens in a shopping mall.

Spying on a trio of babes with big hair, Frank overhears one of the girls ask her overdeveloped friend how she can be hungry, having just eaten a cheeseburger and fries. "Her breasts were growing, Frank thought, they needed food." A radio station-sponsored contest draws Frank deep into the life of the mall. A new Jeep on display there will go to the person who can keep his or her hands on it the longest. Homes deftly moves Frank from peripheral figure to the center of attention as his vicarious involvement turns hysterical. Not all of Homes' notions pan out.

"Yours Truly" and "The I of It" begin in similar fashion: "I'm hiding in the linen closet writing letters to myself" and "I am sitting naked on a kitchen chair staring at it." These stories are little more than exercises in solipsism, but they are eclipsed by her successes that evidence a fully engaged imagination at work and at play. She is sharp, funny and playful without getting careless. Homes and Simon are recent graduates of college writing programs, One of the first pieces of instruction a student of writing hears is: "Don't tell show." The variation I heard was: "Don't claim prove." It is a lesson Simon seems not to have learned, judging by the stories in "Little Nightmares, Little Dreams." There are stories here with sexual themes that try for titillation instead of revelation. They are all claiming, and make the author sound like a Mary Gaitskill wanna-be. "Magnet Please Turn to Page 11 SUNDAY, OCTOBER 28.

1990PAGE 3 Hempel is the author of "Reasons to Live" and "At the Gates oj the Animal Kingdom," collections of stories. LOS ANGELES TIMESBOOK REVIEW.