A World of Pain and Love and Longing : AQUABOOGIE <i> By Susan Straight (Milkweed Editions: $9.95, paper; 195 pp.) </i>

The great strength of “Aquaboogie,” Susan Straight’s remarkable first work of fiction, is the way this “novel-in-stories” brings to life the rich and vibrant life of an all-black community. All the more remarkable is the fact that Straight isn’t black herself, as she explains in an afterword: “People who read my stories are always surprised to find out that I have blue eyes and blond hair. Sometimes it surprises me, too, because I forget--I’ve been in the community so long, no one remembers any more that I’m not black.”

The community she speaks of is the part of Riverside, Calif., where the town meets the country, and arroyos filled with dried, rattling palms cross railroad tracks, and pig farms butt up against new subdivisions carved out of orange groves--a place where the author was born and still lives, fictionalized as the best side of “Rio Seco” in her stories. “Might as well be Mi-sippi,” as one character says of the area. “Y’all ain’t got no clubs, no disco, nothin’ live. You got Jackson Park and The Pit,” meaning the local barbecue joint.

In fact, most of the older people on the Westside have come from Mississippi to California many years ago, settling down and bringing with them their country ways. In California, where everybody is free to reinvent himself, it’s rather remarkable how many of the old ways survive in Rio Seco. Greens grow up along the fences in yards, “old-time” ways hold sway, and pigs feasting on discarded produce oink contentedly and settle themselves in the Southland sun.

But that’s only true of the older generation, and there are a number of generations represented in Straight’s stories. The younger people value “hoopties”--cars--and boom boxes and drugs. “A lot of our friends have gone the same ways James Baldwin used to talk about,” Straight writes, “the prison, the service, or the needle--but now the needle is the pipe; the people smoke cocaine.” Baldwin, whose work was so marked by the combination of truth and art, was one of Straight’s teachers. In her own fiction, the marriage once again is made.

There are 11 stories here, each featuring one character who may show up as a minor figure in another story, people like Roscoe, the poet, who is working off a three-month jail sentence by cleaning up the freeways near Palm Springs, all the while thinking of his grandson, Louie, the bird lover; or Esther, with her beautifully named children--Danique, Colette, Porsha and Anais--who has accepted her husband’s infidelities as a way of keeping her family together.

There’s also Shawan, a switchboard operator who’s lost her best friend to a drive-by shooting, and now values her boom box more than anything in the world, enough so to stand tough against a man who tries to rob her of it on a bus. And there’s Rose and her husband, Donnie, caught in domestic violence that can be explained only by poverty and loneliness, and Buddha, the juvenile detainee who takes a trip to the beach only to discover the startling beauty of tide pools.

And then there’s Lanier, one of my favorite characters, a pig farmer who holds out against the subdevelopers until his fate is sealed and he slaughters pigs nonstop for three days, distributing the hastily butchered pork to friends, including a drugged-out neighbor, a welfare mother who can’t begin to comprehend the gift.

A world of pain and love and longing is contained in these stories. In a foreword to the book, Doris Grumbach talks about the characters, “white America’s black workers, a few at the edge of success but most fixed permanently in the harsh aspic of their fate.” It’s a beautiful phrase, “the harsh aspic of their fate,” but it seemed to me that it fixed too rigidly the fluidity of the lives portrayed in this book.

Even more harsh is the aspic of the subdevelopments encroaching on the Westside of Rio Seco, given names “half-nature, half-England”; tracts of the most anonymous housing, sanitized communities that will never know the interconnectedness of the Westside, where neighbors drop in unannounced, gossip carries the balm of healing, and no matter what happens, families pull together.

I found this aspect of Straight’s work to be hopeful and very telling. What’s being destroyed by an America willing to sacrifice its black youths to gangs and drugs as long as the shootings stay localized is this rich, strong sense of community that cannot be replaced by sterile subdivisions.

Time after time while reading these stories I was struck by the simple beauty of the writing: “a windshield full of dry light and bright floating dust”; a dawn that “didn’t take but a minute to make a day in August”; pepper trees whose branches hang “limp and dusty as a sick rooster’s tail feathers”; crows as “thick as pepper in the sky.” This doesn’t begin to give a sense of the real language of the book, which is black, and very beautiful.

“We live in a talking place, not a reading place,” Straight says at the conclusion of her book. She has listened very carefully to the talking around her, and by making a book that can be read by all, black and white, she has bridged worlds for us, bringing us the news, which has a quiet, very triumphant undertone, no matter how harsh the overlaying reality.

“Aquaboogie” is this year’s winner of the estimable Milkweed National Fiction Prize. I suspect that this will be only one of the prizes this 29-year-old writer will receive in what promises to be a very long career.