A Love Triangle on the Cape

The Summer People

Marge Piercy

Summit Books

390 pp. $19.95

START with a love triangle, its vertices a married couple and a single, widowed woman. Add that the three are artists living, year-round, next to a pond on the Cape. Toss in a schism that threatens to destroy forever the 10-year bond that had kept them knit together.

Sounds like a good book. Sounds like unconventional characters struggling to survive in a steadfastly conventional world. This is Marge Piercy's latest novel, Summer People.

Unfortunately, Piercy's novel fails to live up to its promising beginning. Her three main characters prove to be run-of-the-mill rather than unique. The married couple is Willie--a sculptor happy in his bigamous lifestyle, who refuses to wear anything fancier than jeans and a fishing sweater--and Susan, a fabric designer who lusts after the fashionable New York lifestyle of Tyrone, their wealthy neighbor across the pond.

We seem meant to embrace the unconventionality of these characters, each of whom is sexually involved with Dinah, their composer/musician neighbor, a veteran of countless love affairs with both men and women. The three live together in happy harmony, which Piercy illustrates with her description of how they traditionally spend Christmas:

[Willie and Susan] always made love on Christmas Eve. Willie would have been frightened if they had not, for it would have seemed to him unlucky. In the morning he got up early and went to bring Dinah her presents. They made love that morning. By the time they had breakfast, Susan would be up...she would go to find Dinah and they would share early or midafternoon of Christmas Day...They would all feel cherished, they would feel each relationship individually burnished and their ties strengthened.

PIERCY has tried to integrate modern concerns, like the social difficulties of conducting a bigamous and bisexual lifestyle, and the dangers of AIDS, into her study of these three people and their immediate families and neighbors. At the same time, she addresses traditional issues like the intricacies of relationships between family and friends, and the definition of love itself.

She delves into the lives of Willie and Susan's sensual son, Jimmy (who has recently separated from his wife), Tyrone's daughter, Laurie (whose husband has died from a drug overdose), and Tyrone himself, who lives the ritzy business executive's life in New York but makes frequent pilgrimages to the Cape.

However, Piercy's attempt to integrate these themes falls short. The result is that the characters themselves are shallow and unlikeable. Piercy's thoughtful writing and believable dialogue are only barely enough to keep us reading to find out what happens when a fight between Dinah and Susan ruptures the 10-year triangle.

Yet Piercy fails to resolve the problems she sets herself. She never explains why Susan and Dinah argue, or why each responds to the fight the way she does. Dinah's loneliness leads to her new relationship with Itzak, a renowned flautist. But this development seems almost a non sequitur to the rest of the plot. So does the affair between Laurie and Jimmy, who have been friends since childhood.

Piercy chooses the easy--and uninteresting--way out of the conflicts she creates between her characters. Her supposedly unconventional protagonists select the most conventional of solutions. The novel would have been more interesting if Dinah had chosen not to take another lover, or if Piercy had established a more credible foundation for the relationship between Laurie and Jimmy.

IN places, Piercy's writing style is rich with detail and sharp pithy phrases. She describes the beach: "they sat on the top of the outermost dune watching the waves slide in below, sinuous, cracking the whip of their white backs over the hidden sandbars." Dinah rebels against the routines of her first, marriage, screaming, "'I don't see what liking to fuck you has to do with being confused with a laundry service!'" Or Susan's feelings for Willie: "Susan could feel her desire for him seeping back like sweet red wine, like mulled wine spicy and hot and tipsy."

But Piercy's occasional eloquence and skillful dialogue cannot compensate for Summer People's basic flaw: the lack of an interesting plot. The novel is engrossing enough for a beachside read, but in comparison to Piercy's earlier works, like Small Changes and Braided Lives, it disappoints. Those novels painted likeable, complex charcters, but Summer People offers only shadows of real people, moving in patterns too familiar to be truly interesting.