Today's balmy temps are not the only hint summer will soon return. Tickets go on sale this morning for two big Tweeter Center shows. Beginning at 10, grab seats for Aerosmith and Steven Tyler (inset) on June 24 or Rod Stewart on July 20....

For the favored few, summer is a place - a place to go for a couple of months, a place different from where the rest of the year is spent. Not many of us can so indulge ourselves, nor are we even inclined to...

I'm typing this on someone else's computer while listening to her PJ Harvey CD on her stereo, occasionally glancing out her window at her lovely Soho view. Taking a break, I pat her trusty golden retriever, who is lying at my feet. Deciding I need...

Off in a world not quite of its own there is a realm of literary endeavor known as "women's fiction."… Novels of this genre appear serially in one of the three or four big women's magazines and subsequently in book form. Sometimes, as in the case of A Summer Place, such a novel becomes a very successful book and earns the author a great deal of money. (p. 309) Monetary considerations aside—and few women's fiction writers are so successful, or, frankly, as goo...

[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-con...

"A Summer Place" is much better written than "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit." The trouble is that this craftsmanship serves a conception of life that will not stand examination. At its heart is a conviction that only the self-made man is a "builder." He builds society, of course, or at least "makes" money, but above all he builds the loving domestic community. In their big moments, Mr. Wilson's admirable people walk naked on beaches, feeling ...