Under the Cold Stars

FRIDAY'S FOOTPRINT (244 pp.)--Nadlne Gordimer--Viking ($3.95).

The 13 stories in this new collection deal with Whitest Africa. Some blacks do appear, but only to serve meals, provide background music or fetch and carry.

In other books (A World of Strangers, The Lying Days}, Author Gordimer's characters faced the fact that they were white men, "few, guilty and unloved, in the black men's continent." This time, mostly, they face themselves.

With only each other to treat savagely, they still do a consummate job. In the title story, fat, foolish Rita Cunningham marries her dead husband's stepbrother, a slim, sardonic man with a tomcat's morals and the face of a ''boy film-star." The end is total humiliation for Rita. Women, generally, have a bad time. Our Bovary tells of Sonia Smith, who looks like a dahlia, "large, top-heavy, gorgeous," and who gets satisfaction neither from her small husband nor her stiflingly small home town. South African Author Gordimer, 35, who is a tiny, finely made woman herself, often seems appalled by the size and beefiness of her fellow countrymen--matrons with "goose-fleshed, quaking red arms," and large, blond, blue-eyed men with red faces.

Most of their struggles are internal: soundless voices scream for help while faces keep smiling gamely. But Author Gordimer can describe the outer world as evocatively as the inner chaos of man. A slight story, The Bridegroom, comes alive in its loving account of a night on the Kalahari Desert, a vast stretch of grey sand, thorn bushes and cratered earth, under a "spiky spread of cold stars." In The Gentle Art, she neatly combines her love of the African land with her often shocked observation of its inhabitants. It deals with another night under the cold stars, this time on a wide and sullen river during a hunt for crocodiles. The searchlight's beam picks up the two glowing, red eyes of a crocodile on the river bank. From a distance of three yards the hunter fires and the crocodile's head explodes. The still twitching saurian is hauled aboard, and one of Nadine Gordimer's hearty women, a guest on the expedition, gives tongue. "Oh, my God!" she cries. "Wasn't that wonderful? Did you ever see anything like it! Those eyes! Staring at you! Crash--Whoom--Finished!"

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