[Forgetting Elena] utilizes a marvelously fresh and inventive narrative device right from the very beginning: an amnesiac young man gradually realizes that he is caught in a cross fire of several contending coteries who battle for dominance in a closely knit little social group on a summer resort island. The narrator-hero is eager to please his hosts and to do the socially accepted thing, but he has no idea of his own status within the group and he has forgotten the code for distinguishing the desirable from the reprehensible in that particular milieu.

The somewhat fantastic island on which the action is set is easily identifiable as New York's own Fire Island, with its highly stylized rites, charades and inbred snobberies…. But what might at first seem to be merely a witty parody of a particular subculture's foibles and vagaries actually turns out to be something far more...