[A Summer Place] keeps the reader in suspense at the end of every chapter—waiting for the soap commercial. Can Molly Jorgenson and Johnny Hunter, teen-age lovers and troubled children of divorce, find lasting happiness by racing the stork to the altar? Will Johnny's mother Sylvia desert her alcoholic husband, with his blueblood pedigree and red-ink bank balance, for an adulterous affair with Molly's self-made millionaire father? Is life a game of second chance or an inescapably heir-conditioned nightmare?

The answers to these and sundry other questions are offered in a fictional session of bland man's buff by Sloan Wilson, the man who did more for gray flannel suits than Brooks Brothers….

Novelist Wilson is slick, readable and craftsmanlike. He has again chosen a highly American theme: the intensive pursuit of happiness. But he has recorded his findings without giving himself the satirical elbow room to comment on...