Voyager

By John Skow

TRAVELING LIGHT by Bill Barich Viking; 226 pages; $15.95

Travel reading, when you think about it, is a fairly odd pastime. Essentially, the travel reader is paying someone else, the travel writer, to take a trip for him: not a perilous hunt for the white whale or the source of the Niger, usually, but just a plain old trip. The writer agrees, by implication, to inspect sunsets and pretty girls, to sniff sea air when this is appropriate, to eat and drink fearlessly, to be overcharged by taxi drivers, and to report back. The reader agrees, for some reason, to subsidize this gamboling.

In the case of Bill Barich, a surrogate voyager justly praised for his first book, Laughing in the Hills, the trip is likely to be no farther than is necessary to get to the nearest horse track or trout stream. It is true that in one instance in this collection of ten essays, the nearest track is in Sunbury-on-Thames, Middlesex, England, and in another it is in Florence, Italy. Nevertheless, the reader still capable of shame must feel guilty of a stunning level of shiftlessness: he is letting another man win his bets for him (Barich admits to occasional losses but does not dwell on them), and even catch and eat his fish. As in any such gigolo-gigolee relationship, exquisite tact is required of the paid performer.

The journeyman hits just about the right tone most of the time. He writes well, for instance, but not so well that he seems to be waving a perfumed handkerchief about the landscape. By his campfire after a day of fishing, when it is time to throw a cliche on the flames, he comes up with a good, chunky one: "I woke just once during the night, when a Union Pacific freight train wailed in the distance.

The sound was so melancholy it gave me the chills." Don't care for wailing freights? You're reading the wrong book.

Barich embellishes the moment ("It was like somebody weeping in a darkened the ater long after the movie's ended"), and the effect is corny, but nice, like a good fishing trip. His race-track humor slides in and out of straight-faced paragraphs so deftly you hardly realize you've been stung. The author reports of an unhurried race horse, for instance, that "Sterling Drive broke from the rail, with infinite care, and headed directly for the parking lot, going so wide on the first turn that several fans groaned." The deftness and dryness here, an infinitely careful nag, indeed, is worthy of Red Smith.

Barich is especially good at the travel writer's peculiar con -- getting the reader to enjoy his enjoyment -- in a couple of pieces he wrote about spending several months in Florence. He is so deft at this that even a long list of pasta types ( "anelli, or rings; anellini, little rings; anellini rigati, little grooved rings . . . ") seems to be infused with joy. At only one point does he spill good taste on his tie. He is leaning on the rail at the Hippodrome, waiting for the races to start, and the great Brunelleschi dome of the Florence cathedral happens to be in his line of vision. So far, O.K., but then, uncharacteristically, he aestheticizes: "Its simple, straightforward, elegant lines suggest that Brunelleschi arrived at its form only after discarding every other possible form. It has about it the spirituality of deep meditation--of a truth perceived, then rendered. It seems absolutely lacking in ego; in its purity, it abolishes the very notion of a Brunelleschi. This isn't true of Michelangelo's work, which has about it an ineradicable quality of self-aggrandizement." Yes, but Red Smith would have kept it to himself.

On beer, Barich is very sound. In a hauntingly evocative essay he describes how he found just the right London pub.

He is almost rapturous, in fact--like a man who has prepared himself for the typewriter with a couple of pints--in describing the effects of English beer: whisky, he observes truthfully, "tends to sweep the drinker into sudden, unpredictable moods, often of a provocative nature, but good ale or stout loosens the vocables and sets free our hidden desire for intimacy. A glass or two of Burton will make even the shiest person want to lean over and tap the stranger on the next stool." So it will.

And the reader, by now quite thirsty but no longer a stranger, feels that Traveling Light has ended far too soon. He is moved to urge Barich onward. Take more trips, he wants to say, for those of us whose luggage has grown too heavy to lug. Tell us about moonlight on the Irrawaddy, about Greek waiters, Australian beer, about the perils of pari-mutuel-punting in Argentina. Listen to local wisdom in Portugal, soak up nonsense in Iceland. Get moving, man, before your toes take root and you too have to pay someone to do your light traveling. --By John Skow