Bookends: May 16, 1988

RIDING THE IRON ROOSTER: BY TRAIN THROUGH CHINA

by Paul Theroux

Putnam; 480 pages; $21.95

"Grin like a dog and wander aimlessly." This gnomic advice for the wayfarer is offered by the world's pre-eminent train traveler in his wry, humorful and occasionally querulous account of a journey across China by rail. (The Iron Rooster of the title, locally known as the cheapskate express, is the train from Beijing to Urumqi.) As Theroux makes excruciatingly clear, traveling alone in the Middle Kingdom is not for the faint of heart or stomach: the food is mostly vile, the toilets are filthy, and drafty coaches are invariably crowded with unbathed passengers who yammer and spit.

But there are surprises. The author of such chronicles of nomadism as The Great Railway Bazaar and The Old Patagonian Express has an uncanny eye for telling details and bizarre statistics -- for example, 35 million Chinese still live in caves. Theroux finds a kind of Nirvana at the end of a hair- raising side trip to Tibet -- ironically by auto, not rail. He is overwhelmed by the indomitable verve of the Tibetans, who have kept alive their culture and loyalty to the exiled Dalai Lama despite the methodical savagery of Beijing's rule. And why is Tibet such a paradise? This remote land of monks and mountains, Theroux notes, is the only area of China without trains. "I thought I liked railways until I saw Tibet," he surprisingly concludes, "and then I realized that I liked wilderness much more."

THE MYSTERIES OF PITTSBURGH

by Michael Chabon

Morrow; 297 pages; $16.95

Early in this bright, funny, mannered first novel, Art Bechstein, the heterosexual hero, fresh out of college and understandably eager to postpone adulthood by whatever means necessary, talks himself into a summer of deviant fiddledeedee. "It was not as though I had any firm or fearful objection to homosexuals," he reflects when one makes an advance. "In certain books by gay writers I thought I had appreciated the weight and secret tremble of their thoughts . . . It was only that I felt keen to avoid, as they say, a misunderstanding." Ah, yes. So Art wobbles rubber-legged between Phlox, a beautiful but shallow young woman, and Arthur, a beautiful young man of fascinating secret sorrows. The pages bounce along amusingly, although a subplot involving Bechstein's father, supposedly a big-shot gangster, never makes much sense. A heterosexual reader may experience a "gack" reaction when Art reaches tenderly for the wrong sort of flesh, but that does no harm. The book's major flaw is that occasional paragraphs are too self-indulgently exquisite, as if the author had written them while wearing yellow spats.

THE SALAD DAYS

by Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

Doubleday; 431 pages; $19.95