Books: A Grinning Buddha

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FONG AND THE INDIANS by Paul Theroux. 199 pages. Houghfon Mifflin. $4.95.

The morning-line odds are 99-1 against a young American writing a novel about contemporary Africa that is neither artistically pretentious nor piously angry, but just funny. Paul Theroux, 26, a former Peace Corps volunteer now teaching English at Makerere University in Uganda, beats the odds. He has produced a satire out of very unlikely material: a Chinese grocer struggling for survival in a mythical East African country.

His bumbling hero, Sam Fong, is the perfect dupe. Trapped in an East African revolution, he gives up his vocation as a carpenter and buys a worthless grocery store from a wily Indian named Fakhru. Fakhru fleeces Fong daily, ultimately conning him into buying 27 cases of black-market UNICEF milk, on the unlikely chance that the regular milk train will be derailed by revolutionary terrorists. Meanwhile, Fong becomes a political pingpong ball in a riotous contest between Chinese Communists and American agents, both of whom have somehow concluded that Fong is a pivot in the ideological struggle between East and West. Fong endures it all with the patience of a grinning Buddha: "As a carpenter he did not have to grin at all. As a grocer he found that he spent most of the day grinning. He would not have noticed it except that it made his face hurt." As the story unfolds in a gracefully comic style comparable to that of Joyce Cary's in The Horse's Mouth, the author, too, flashes the reader a winning smile.