Solid as a Bridge

THE OUTCASTS by Stephen Becker. 240 pages. Atheneum. $4.95.

Harvard-educated Stephen Becker, 39, is a fiddle-footed traveler with a facile pen. He has lived in China, France, Alaska and the Guianas and supported himself as a translator, biographer, historian, and novelist (A Covenant with Death). Recently he has shown signs of settling down--near Katonah, N.Y., and as a novelist. In this newest and best of his books, he handles a Conradian theme with commendable assurance.

Becker's hero is Engineer Bernard Morrison, who has built many things but never a bridge. At 43, he finally gets his chance. His bridge must span a gorge at the end of an unbuilt road in the South American Guianas. Morrison is vexed that neither bridge nor road seems to go anywhere. "Never mind," says his American boss. "Just build a bridge."

Morrison does. Things begin badly when he insults his assistant, a black Guianan named Philips, by mistaking him for a porter. Next, he is worried by the discovery that after a hard day, his Hindu foreman relaxes with hashish.

Such problems soon vanish in the joy of difficult labor going well. On weekends, when the work gang is roistering in the city, Morrison prowls beyond the gorge and encounters the Lani, a tribe of bushmen. Among these simple, amoral savages, he rediscovers the unsophisticated pleasures, the quick and easy friendships of a time when "all tastes were like summer and youth, before alcohol and tobacco and sour love."

Like Conrad, Becker is fascinated by the tactical struggles of daily life, the strategic deployments that bring one man success and another failure. Philips will go far in his nation, but he remains a man without friends. Morrison wants passionately the pastoral simplicity he sees in the Lani, but it is almost his undoing when he learns the hard way that syphilis is endemic among the bush people. Becker has filled his story with lush scenery and pungent characters and built it as solidly as Morrison's bridge.

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