Good Clean Fun

THE BRIGHT SANDS (254 pp.)--Robert Lewis Taylor--Doubleday ($3.50).

For a nation that enjoys humor, the U.S. gets mighty little in its fiction, and things are apt to get worse before they get better. That is enough to make book news of the latest volume by Robert Lewis Taylor, a profile writer for The New Yorker and, most recently, a biographer of W. C. Fields and Winston Churchill. The Bright Sands offers a good share of laughs, plus a steady run of chuckles and a warm feeling for the human race.

Out on Cape Cod Novelist Taylor finds just the setting and the people to suit him. Its crusty old characters are dying out, but the ones Taylor describes are more likely to cackle than to whimper when their time comes. True, their role is no longer heroic, and they are more apt to die in bed than at sea. But old codgers like Uncle Veenie and Captain Ezra Cobb are firmly in the Yankee tradition, and they are as slick at fleecing the summer folks as ever their forebears were at trimming the sails.

As a summer migrant from the big city, Geologist Bill Willis has enough sense to make pals of Uncle Veenie and Ezra Cobb. One result of this is that Ezra never steals from the Willises. The fact is that "Captain" Cobb never was a captain; he lives by petty thievery and renting out a couple of leaky boats to mainland innocents.

While Ezra's trouble is chiefly with the police, Bill Willis and his wife are brought low by a prolonged marital spat. Myra is convinced that Bill is experimenting with her sister Joan, a physically overripe 15year-old who flaunts her charms with the naturalness of a dolphin showing off alongside. Before this gets ironed out, it becomes plain that Author Taylor has made almost as close a study of the jealous wife as he has of his Cap Cod types. Best friends of the Willises are the Bensons, whose "detestation of each other had gone so far that they no longer got on each other's nerves but were, in fact, rather good friends."

The Bright Sands is studded with set pieces that will tickle all but misanthropes: Captain Cobb's annual auction of stolen articles, his drunken acceptance of the prize for the season's largest striped bass (illegitimately come by), his bogus historical lecture inspired by the finding of a complete skeleton. But Author Taylor's affection for Cape Cod and its people sometimes transcends comic writing, and his description of an offshore rescue by the local Coast Guard men during a hurricane is a model of exact reporting. The Bright Sands takes few fictional liberties with its natural setting. Those it takes with its characters keep Taylor well this side of libel, but won't stop the guessing games around Cape Cod stoves during the off season.

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