Ocean Vu, Jog to Beach

Yuppies renting summer houses on the Long Island shore are easy targets for broad humor, but Wood, author of Welcome to the Club, has more than easy potshots for the group that takes over Slocum House from the end of May to early September. A nucleusWall Street lawyer Clive Wheelwright and his fiancee Moira Fairchildexpands to include Dreda Scott, a hotshot black arbitrageur, Stu Stuart, who writes for Sports Illustrated, and Moira's sister Catherine, an aspiring novelist. Stu brings in two former football players from Boston College, and Catherine finds V. Y. Ouspenskiy, Russian emigre poet and sociologist manque, who, as the book's narrator, reports his housemates' strange behavior with both professional and cultural distance. Once Vlady gives up footnotes and occasional linguistic lapses (he has an ``oxsent''), his acute observationson ``work-play'' for instance, as in Clive's playing tennis with a senior partner from his firmare on the mark. As Vlady grows increasingly attached to them all, this houseful of yuppies breaks through the stereotype to become people to care about. While Clive becomes disenchanted with yuppie tenets and the various couples gradually rearrange themselves, the narrative moves smartly to its melee of a resolution. Lively and entertaining, this comedy of summer manners proves there's life beyond Labor Day. (July)