Rare Birds

THE SUMMER HOUSES (278 pp.) --James Stevenson -- Macmillan ($4.95).

Linked by an umbilical causeway to a shadowy mainland. Great Heron Island is the summer nesting place of a memorable colony of rare social birds. It swims in a body of water carefully left vague by the author but which readers will have no trouble at all locating -- due south of O'Hara Point, due east of Marquand

Sound. On Great Heron, the great divide is not between rich and poor; there are no poor. It is the lingering schism from the great debate of 1942. when family was set against family over whether to hold the annual island croquet tournament in wartime. The "it would be bad taste'' faction finally won out over those who insisted that "the Boys would want the tournament . . . after all what are they fighting for?"

So mallet-headed a paradise clearly cries out for some kind of serpent. Obligingly, the author supplies an industrialist named McKinney, who, with unlimited cash and chicanery, sets about acquiring the whole island so that he can turn it into a kind of floating museum of early Americana.

In this engaging second novel. Author James Stevenson, 33, displays Marquand's feel for the half rueful, wholly droll confrontation between the really wellborn and those who are merely born to do well. But he is less interested in dynastic decay than in dilettante dilemma. The islanders' big "fight McKinney" meeting bogs down in bickering about whether or not a mole has been gnawing at croquet court number three, and the whole argument becomes entirely academic when a pair of McKinney's bulldozers crash onto the court in the middle of the annual tournament. A hapless adulterer, surprised by strolling teen-agers as he waits for an assignation on the beach at night, has to take to the sea fully clothed. " 'Water's great; he croaked, trying to sound carefree. His necktie was floating in front of his chin."

The Great Heron islands of this world have been doomed so long now that nobody, least of all fond Author Stevenson, can take them seriously. But as resident Prospero to a tempest in a teapot, he obviously could not end on a dying fall. To no one's surprise. McKinney, bulldozers and all, never gets to make the island into a museum. Stevenson has neatly tended to that himself.

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