April 11, 1993

EVEN as much of the world dissolves into a single, faceless market, some things just won't happen. Dunkin' Donuts would not try to sell baguettes to Parisians. Benihana would not open hot-dog stands in the United States. Pepsico, surely, would not sell tacos to the Mexicans. Think again on that last one. Pepsico, which owns the Taco Bell chain, saw the fattening wallets of Mexico's younger generation, splashed some extra hot sauce onto its tacos and headed across the border.

FICTION writers, always on the lookout for their own peculiar truths, must first create a world in which revelation is possible. When a writer opens an imagined cupboard in the corner of an imagined room, when she drops evidence into the pocket of some character's blue jeans, when she fills a town, a forest, a face with details, she searches for details with life, with personality, with influence. Concrete objects influence the best of stories. They have impact -- a word that has to do with motion, with kinetic activity. When one object strikes another, it puts the second object in motion. And when the second object strikes a third, it does the same thing -- knocking the third object over, skewing it, throwing it off course. When an author writes a piece of fiction, she imagines that its details are billiard balls or dominoes, and then endows even the most apparently mundane of them with the properties of an eight ball or the energy of that first flick of a finger.

The Rangers did not know what to feel. Should they be hopeful? Should they be frustrated? Should they be angry? Should they even care?

THE elevator in the Rayburn House Office Building stopped at the first floor on its way to the basement one recent Wednesday evening, and Representative Robert Menendez, the freshman New Jersey Democrat, stepped aboard and found himself face to face with Representative Jack Brooks, Democrat of Texas, who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee. Mr. Brooks, who was wearing a tuxedo and a cowboy hat, was on his way to a reception. After greeting Mr. Menendez, he remarked, "You have an important vote on the floor," alluding to a budget measure. Mr. Menendez assured him that he was on his way, and the two men parted.

CULTURE OF COMPLAINT The Fraying of America. By Robert Hughes. 210 pp. New York: The New York Public Library/ Oxford University Press. KINDLY INQUISITORS The New Attacks on Free Thought. By Jonathan Rauch. 178 pp. Chicago: A Cato Institute Book/ The University of Chicago Press.