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THE LONELY CONQUEROR, by Willi Heinrich (379 pp.; Dial; $4.95). British Critic Cyril Connolly once complained of the novelists who "can only sling a few traits on to the characters they are depicting and then hold them there. 'You can't miss So-and:So,' they explain, 'he stammers and now look, here he comes -;"What's your name?" "S-s-s-so- and-s-s-s-s-so" ' ' The novel of racial misalliance is often given to such trait slinging, and The Lonely Conqueror is no exception. The hero, Sergeant John Baako, U.S. Army, has colored skin, but beneath it lies a colorless stereotype. As Baako and his German sweetheart careen from the valley of the Rhine to the hinterlands of the Zambezi, the common indignities, predictably enough, cluster upon them like cattle flies. But when she says, "I know a lot of men who aren't half the man you are, even though their skin is the same color as mine"; and when he feels "inferior to white women only as long as they hid underneath their dresses"; it is clear that the level of communication will be mainly horizontal. Love is a skin game to The Lonely Conqueror, and the game is only skin deep.

TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY, by John Steinbeck (246 pp.; Viking; $4.95). Put a famous author behind the wheel of a three-quarter-ton truck called Rocinante (after Don Quixote's horse), equip him with everything from trenching tools to subzero underwear, send along a pedigreed French poodle named Charley with prostatitis. follow the man and dog on a three-month, 10,000-mile trip through 34 states, and what have you got? One of the dullest travelogues ever to acquire the respectability of a hard cover. Vagabond Steinbeck's motive for making the long, lonely journey is admirable: "To try to rediscover this monster land" after years of easy living in Manhattan and a country place in Sag Harbor. L.I. He meets some interesting people: migrant Canucks picking potatoes in Maine, an itinerant Shakespearean actor in North Dakota, his own literary ghost back home in California's Monterey Peninsula. But when the trip is done, Steinbeck's attempt at rediscovery reveals nothing more remarkable than a sure gift for the obvious observation.

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