Surf Opera

PHOENIX ISLAND (284 pp.)--Leslie Waller--Lippincott ($3.95).

Summer fiction is life seen in bikini-scope. It covers little, and that hazily. Phoenix Island is the hot season's first literary scantyweight, and it is fitfully amusing. The scarcely disguised locale is the New York summer resort of Fire Island, but the cast of psychoneurotic summer people and scurvy natives needs to be taken with a pinch of salt water.

The heroine of this surf opera is 19-year-old Jordan Moore, a button-bright blonde girl who dreams of carving a career niche in the great stone face of Manhattan. When she hears that the "mass media" set spends its summers on Phoenix Island, Jordan signs on for a baby-tending stint with a one-child family named French--an experience that gradually turns into Operation Mad Ball.

The child is merely precocious, but the parents are nearly psychotic. Jordan's first service to her mistress is to scoop up the razor blade with which suicide-bent Elise French has slashed her wrist. Seems that Elise suffers from bottle fatigue (too much vodka) and pencil-envy. She pines for the days when she used to turn out some of the top publicity copy on Madison Avenue. Hubby Carter is a $100,000-a-year magazine publisher and as full of answers as an IBM machine, except that he never asks himself the right questions about his wife or his life.

As Jordan meets other Phoenix Islanders, she begins to feel that only the sun, sea and sand qualify as neither phony nor vicious. There is a Beat Generation bop-talker who tries to soft-sell Jordan on a cool love affair. There is a native Neanderthal man who tries to pin Jordan to the floorboards of the half-built ginmill in which he hopes to mulct the summer trade. There are assorted homosexuals, spivish repairmen and alcoholics-unanimous from TV, ad alley and publishers' row. The crisis on which the plot slowly turns is whether the Neanderthal man will complete his ginmill to the ruin of the summer dwellers' dunes. Author Waller neatly wrings a lemon twist of satire from the hectic meeting of the homeowners' protective association. With the aid of a LIFE picture spread and some planted items among Manhattan gossipists, Elise French saves the dunes, her marriage, her babysitter and her self-respect.

Author Waller, 35, is himself a Manhattan public-relations man. His novel is printed on mint-green paper with "chromatically related'' dark green lettering. The Whiteford Paper Co.'s E. A. Whiteford, who minted this process, argues that the book has "built-in sun glasses" and saves the reader the "repellent" eyestrain of conventional black and white.

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