Medium Cool

By J.D. Reed

SUMMER IN THE CITY by Mark Stevens Random House; 360 pages; $16.95

The legion of up-and-coming baby boomers have needed a voice. As observers have noted, the Yuppies grind their own coffee beans, sip Chablis, dress for success and book passage on the inside track. But what goes on behind their apartment doors? First Novelist Mark Stevens knows, and he cannily details their secret titillations and minor tragedies through the adventures of three characters in search of a lifestyle.

One quest is for coolness. After a year of cultural and emotional R. and R. in Montana, former Magazine Writer Kelly Martin returns to the heat of a New York City summer resolved to find happiness by achieving a perfect balance between being "loving and acid-smart." Instead, she meets the laconic Jennings, whose last name is never mentioned, and returns to her favorite indoor sport: power tripping.

Jennings, a top TV technician, is the compleat Yuppie ("clever, ironic, knowing, casual"), who views life as a videotape that needs editing; his boss, Talk-Show Host Billy Bell, sees it as a sequel to success. Bell has a few upscale plans of his own, among them bedding Kelly and beginning a political career. Only one problem nags: he does not know what politicians actually do. "They announced and attacked," writes Stevens. "He knew he would excel at that. But the rest?"

This busy (but nonsexual) triangle is in trouble from the start. For one thing, their schedules permit very little intimacy. For another, their inner urges find expression only in public places. Status, not love, is their true goal. Jennings wears designer fashions but cuts out the labels to avoid seeming affected. Billy dines at Mama's, a celebrity watering hole where "they serve you your importance." And Kelly acquires the right stuff at Prendergast's ("Prendie's"), a Bloomingdale's-like store whose underwear department, Private Parts, is off-limits to men.

All three haunt another emporium, the Cat's Paw. In this posh pornography boutique on Manhattan's Upper East Side, the dirty magazines and sexual implements are tastefully displayed. There Kelly makes her re-entry into journalism by interviewing a peep-show dancer who is addicted to fan magazines. Billy, in a Scotch-fueled search for campaign issues, settles arbitrarily on pornography. In an alcoholic blackout, he destroys mirrors and private movie booths with a chain. Amid the shambles, Jennings advises him to tell the authorities, "You did it on purpose."

The action exhausts them all, and in the end love proves to be beyond their understanding. In her embalmed-looking living room, Kelly reflects, "One is left, if one wishes, with nuance. That was if one . . . could find a nuance worth noting, in what was always the same game. The repetition! ... the exchange of stories, aren't we interesting?, the nodding, let's agree to disagree.', bed. The same old record with the needle stuck."

Summer in the City is a novel of nouns, not verbs. On the way to a gloomily fitting finale, Stevens, art critic at Newsweek, decorates his book with wry, wan observations. Trendy SoHo lofts, he says, must contain "something ugly in an interesting way." And he memorializes a public diary reading by noting that "two spotlights were aimed at a solitary stool, and the little stage smelled of sneakers."

The most notable flaw of Summer in the City is that of the "imitative fallacy": the novel is as neutral and uncommitted as its cast. The author has neither distanced himself sufficiently for satire nor empathized enough to make the reader care for the characters. Stevens exhibits more than enough wit for two first novels. But after 18 chapters of crudites and quiche, one longs for some meat and potatoes.

--By J.D.Reed