BOOK REVIEW : Generic Novel With a Familiar Plot : STARTING WITH SERGE <i> by Laurie Stone</i> Doubleday $18.95, 224 pages

Though you may not find this story in your tattered copy of “100 Sure-Fire Plots,” it’s bound to be in the revised and updated edition, used by thousands of satisfied authors; reviewed by smaller numbers of patient critics--smaller, because most of us have read at least 100 variations of “Starting With Serge.” What we have here is the generic novel of the last three decades, in its most fundamental form.

The narrator is Julie Stark, precocious daughter of Herschel, a man risen from humble beginnings to affluence. Though the novel begins while the family still lives in New York’s Washington Heights, they soon move to the suburb of Luna Island, a posh enclave that immediately disappoints them.

Julie’s mother, Thea, dutifully goes to a PTA meeting, only to announce after her first exposure that “it’s not for me.” Father Herschel joins the Kiwanis club; he buys a set of golf clubs and a barbecue, but none of these bucolic diversions turn out to be for him, either.

Every Friday night, Thea meets her husband in The City for diversion, returning to the island with bags of delicatessen. “When I’d ask how the old neighborhood was, they’d say ‘Horrible. Horrible then and horrible now.’ But they kept going back.”

The year is 1959, a time frame that provides Julie with a generous supply of squareness to excoriate. When her sister Madelyn comes home from college in the midst of her first semester after a minor nervous breakdown (that term was still current), the entire Stark family eagerly embarks upon psychotherapy.

The guru is Serge, a Russian emigre shrink recommended by sophisticated brother Wolf, whose wife and two daughters also are being treated by him. Though Serge bears an uncannily close resemblance to Rasputin, the Starks have little in common with the Romanovs, except for their geographical origins. Even so, they fall under Serge’s spell in exactly the same way as the Czar and Czarina, believing absolutely in his ability to work wonders.

Madelyn stops “acting morose,” loses weight and takes courses at NYU. Thea registers at the New School and broadens her horizons by reading Swift and Conrad. When family tensions become unbearable, Serge is called, and “the yelling would stop, and my father would look content.” Herschel was only a phone patient, but soon young Julie becomes a full-fledged analysand, visiting Serge for preventive therapy the year she enters a new private day school.

She’s enchanted. Serge is her passport to maturity. “When I turned, Serge was standing in the doorway, a man in his mid-60s, looking nothing like Moses and everything like Charles Laughton in his Henry VIII period. . . . What can I do to help you? he asked.”

For the next quarter of the book, Julie tells him at considerable length, a useful device that allows her to fill us in on the trials of growing up on Long Island in the early ‘60s: girlish crushes, sexual awakening, alienation from mother, adoration of father--the lot.

Throughout this period, Julie is becoming stunningly attractive and amazingly worldly for her years. By the time she’s 15, she’s invited by Serge for a weekend at his summer house, proving conclusively that she can hold her own with a gaggle of European intellectuals who sound like send-ups of Sartre and De Beauvoir in the Deux Magots cafe.

“Men mistake their fears for reality and call this the world. Women are right to be mistrustful.” During this epochal weekend, Serge reveals himself for what he is--a dirty old man--but Julie never tells anyone until 1980, when Part II begins.

Julie is now a painter, the jaded veteran of several love affairs. Madelyn has pulled herself together and become a tycoon, owning a chain of pizza shops, in which her retired parents work until Herschel’s grueling death. After this event, Julie calls upon Serge’s old friend Wildeweiss, whom she met at the house party 20 years earlier. “I want to talk about Serge,” she says, and he promptly turns over a cache of letters to her.

Reading these, we become even more ambivalent about Serge than does our narrator, but then, he wasn’t our first Serge, not by a long shot.

Next: Carolyn See reviews “Springs of Living Water” by Karen Lawrence (Villard).