Loose Ends, L.I.

THE SUMMER LOVERS (307 pp.) -- Hollis Alpert--Knopf ($3.95).

This first novel portrays the summer season at what might be called Loose Ends, Long Island, where there is plenty of sun, sea, sand, sex and susceptibility. Through the dazzle of hot days and perfervid nights moves Sally Pierce, a golden-glowing, nubile 19-year-old whose life is complicated by the fact that her divorced mother has remarried. Stepfather Andrew Wells is the sort of pipe-smoking, tweedy adult to make a Radciiffe girl's heart do nip-ups. To complete the idyl, there are two other men: Chris, a callow college graduate; and Chadburn, a hesitant illustrator. The question: Who will get Sally? The answer: nearly everybody.

When Sally is not bounding from bed to bed, she is asking the sort of defiant, wide-eyed questions that, in fiction anyway, have such a devastating effect on grownups. She is also a determined kiss-and-tell girl, and after sleeping with her stepfather, endlessly discusses the affair with other members of the household. Mother proves the most understanding of the lot, but young Chris is outraged. Says he: "You're too much for me. You look so normal, but you're as mixed up as any of them!" To prove his own normality, he abandons the pursuit of Sally and makes a determined pass at Mom.

Author Alpert, 41, who has written for magazines as dissimilar as The New Yorker and Seventeen, has some difficulty totting up the reasons for Sally's amoral behavior. He gets in a few licks at "progressive" education, cuttingly describes the "intellectual bohemianism" of Sally's environment, and then seems to veer to a primitive belief that women lack souls--or, at any rate, consciences. At summer's end all of the men have in a sense been used up and thrown away. The women, as usual, are in control. All in all, the book is satisfactory seashore entertainment. Anyone reading it on certain Long Island beaches need only look up from the pages to find the characters--if not the plot--all around him in the sand.

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