BOOK REVIEW : Bleak Look at World of Southern Whites : WHITE PEOPLE <i> by Allan Gurganus</i> , Alfred A. Knopf, $21.95, 252 pages

Allan Gurganus’ first book, a novel titled “Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All,” was published last year to considerable critical acclaim. It became a bestseller, with 170,000 copies in print, and earned him--according to the publicity accompanying his new book--comparisons to Dickens, Rabelais, Joyce and Twain, among others.

The stories in “White People” describe the lives of white people, mostly Southerners, isolating them in such a way that it’s possible, encouraged by the book’s title, to think of them in terms of this whiteness, witnessing it as outside observers.

In these stories, white isn’t exactly a pejorative, but it has its limitations. A pallor is associated with the word, a feeling of frozen emotion, a dryness and a hanging back that has “already turned our white race into the losing side,” as one character puts it.

These white people know how to make money, but are stiff in their feelings. “I seem to manage the career thing pretty much OK,” another character says, “but I’ve never ever really got the hang of the love part.” Sex among these white people is another clouded area, secretive, furtive. They are pederasts and voyeurs, collectors of pornography or aged beyond the pale of desire.

Three of the stories--”Minor Heroism: Something About My Father,” “Breathing Room: Something About My Brother” and “A Hog Loves Its Life: Something About My Grandfather”--feature a character named Bryan, whom I suspect is a strong stand-in for the author. Taken as a trilogy, they form a strong picture of a Southern family.

“Your family will decide for you exactly who you are,” Bryan says, and it will do so “without much accuracy, with strangely little love at all.” The suggestion of Bryan’s homosexuality, however, makes it seem as if he has broken out of the mold.

“Minor Heroism,” which first appeared in the New Yorker, is a finely crafted story set in a small Southern town. It opens with Bryan reflecting on his father’s reputation as a minor hero as a result of his participation in the bombing of Dresden during World War II. A sense of faded glory permeates the household. Bryan’s father’s finest hour has passed (“You resign yourself to buying bourbon by the case . . . you learn to make do . . . now grounded, in the awful safety of this decade.”).

The second part of the story switches to the father’s voice. He is worried about Bryan, who lives in New York and writes for Dance World, a magazine he can’t stand even to see. He gets a “sinking feeling” whenever anyone asks about his son. Bryan is a “mystery” to him:

“You start off with a child, a son,” he thinks, “and for the first six years he’s on your side. It’s clear there’s nothing wrong with him. He’s healthy, and you’re relieved. . . .

“Then things somehow get off the track . . . he’s inside listening to records when he ought to be outside playing with the others . . . you wonder for a moment if this white-skinned kid can be 14 years old; can he be half your responsibility, half your fault?”

The true jewel in this collection is the final tale, “Blessed Assurance,” a novella with the weight of a much longer work. Jerry, a 19-year-old white boy who is putting himself through college, gets a job collecting funeral insurance payments from black customers who live in an area of town known as “Baby Africa.”

The blacks are all poor and exploited by the funeral company, which understands the importance blacks place on a proper burial. The company has a ruthless policy: If the insured misses two weeks’ payments, the policy is cancelled, no matter how many years, and how many thousands of dollars, have been paid on it.

Jerry is warned by his boss to let no one slide, to show no kindness of heart toward those who can’t pay. “Once they smell heart on you, kid, you’re lost.” But Jerry does show heart, toward a 90-year-old black woman named Vesta Lotte Battle. As Mrs. B. falls further and further behind in her payments, Jerry becomes increasingly desperate.

He also begins to be transformed by his association with her into a man who’s discovered “group life,” the power of fellow-feeling, and especially the feeling in the black community, where people seem “more fluid, faster moving, closer to the earth and ready to adapt, sweat, go with things.”

When he attends an Afro-Baptist funeral at the end of the story, and a black mourner yells out at him, “Just tell the troof!” we understand that the awkward white boy, as a result of his exposure to the immeasurable dignity of Mrs. B., has come much closer to being able to do so.

“Whitie does what whitie can,” Jerry concludes. It seems a fitting coda for these stories, in which the very human limitations of the empowered of the earth are revealed.

If Gurganus has a flaw as a writer, it’s that he sometimes takes five sentences to say what could be said in one. He’s in love with the language itself, and occasionally that love of language (“Language is like love,” as Bryan’s grandfather shows him) seems to serve the master of style, rather than the master of substance.

Gurganus is neither Twain nor Joyce--those claims are hyperbolic and inaccurate--but he is a fine writer, capable of crafting stories that are elegant, mysterious and satisfying.

Next: Carolyn See reviews “Joy” by Marsha Hunt (Dutton).