Beach Boy in an Ebb Tide : WHALE MUSIC<i> by Paul Quarrington (Doubleday: $17.95; 226 pp.) </i>

Itend to dislike films portraying the lives of contemporary musicians. Two recent examples, one about Charlie Parker and one about Jerry Lee Lewis, are cases in point.

The films got the details right: The white Berg Larsen mouthpiece on Bird’s King Super 20 alto sax, the beat-up white piano the Killer pounded. But I’ve seen documentary footage, lots of it, on these famous musicians, and watching Forrest Whittaker and Dennis Quaid playing them wasn’t very convincing. The graven screen image was no substitute for the real thing. Maybe the less one knows, the more one is free to enjoy such films.

I’m equally fussy about books. Give me a well-researched and well-written biography and I can’t put it down. But while I’m no expert on the Beach Boys, not even much of a fan, I had plenty of problems with Paul Quarrington’s fifth novel, “Whale Music.”

The Canadian novelist’s book is a roman a clef about Brian Wilson’s life after his brother’s death, with plenty of flashbacks about family life and the rise to fame of one of the most popular groups of all time.

The Beach Boys took California sunshine and surf and splashed its happy message all over the world: a mythic American youth of surfing, girls, your first set of wheels. Sweet, innocent pleasures of teen-age youth were the distinctly Californian themes, and these were apolitical, pre-drug, pre-antiwar and pre-Beatlemania (though they definitely influenced the Fab Four).

The Beach Boys’ paean to California youth culture sours abruptly when you look at the harrowing lives of Brian and Dennis Wilson. Perhaps no greater disparity exists than that between the utter wholesomeness of their all-American music and their messed-up lives.

Dennis Wilson jumped off a moored yacht in 1983, hit his head on the Marina del Rey bottom, and died. Brian Wilson is still with us, although his creative output has ground to a halt. His psychiatrist, Dr. Eugene Landy, co-wrote the lyrics on the solo album that came out about two years ago. Brian Wilson seemed the shell of his former self.

And it is at this point that “Whale Music” picks up the saga of the superannuated star. In Quarrington’s fictionalized account, we find Desmond Howl perched on a cliff overlooking the Pacific in a million-dollar home protected by about every security device except a moat and live crocodiles.

Howl fiddles with his state-of-the-art Yamaha 6600 on his latest project, the whale music. The majestic sea creatures seem a sort of idealized metaphor: They don’t fall victim to the complex emotions that wrack our lives, and certainly not to the emotional paralysis and inertia that taint Howl’s daily life. In music and in life, the cetacean state of grace is something Howl aspires to, and a little booze and drugs probably will smooth his path in getting there.

Howl tells us his story in the first person: his early talent for music, his idolization of his brother Dannie, the ambitious and conniving father (Wilson’s own father was an opportunist who in the late ‘60s sold the publishing rights to all of Brian’s songs for quick big bucks).

The book is about the rise and fall of the famous Howl Brothers whose first big hit, “Torque, Torque,” launched them into superstardom (substitute The Beach Boys’ 1962 hit, “Surfin’ ”). Desmond Howl, who has spent the last few years horizontal in his hermetically sealed seaside manse, is pulled out of his semi-permanent torpor by Claire, a mental-hospital escapee from Toronto and a former groupie of a metal band whose members are into Satan worship and other lovely things.

One day Claire shows up at Desmond’s place. (We find out later that she was really looking for the now-departed Dannie.) Twenty-year-old Claire passes her days wandering around the house and pool, clothing optional. Desmond Howl, for his part, takes refuge in bed, but also rummages around for any drugs or alcohol that might have been stashed out of sight of his therapist and well-meaning friends.

Sometimes he gets lucky, and thus inspired, enters the music room, wherein sits the Beast, the Yamaha 6600, the contraptual equivalent to having the Berlin Philharmonic in your living room. Better than the redoubtable orchestra, the Beast can imitate sounds of nature so well that it would make Paul Winter green with envy. Like whale music, for instance.

Claire lures Howl out of years of lethargy, and the two manage to become intimate a few times. By the time Claire has become quite at home, and Desmond has rediscovered a long-dormant sexuality and starts to be able to reach out again to another person, the two quarrel over uninvited guests she’s let into the house, and she splits.

Howl then is forced to come out of his shell, leave his seaside fortress and go searching through the seedier side of Los Angeles to find her. This he does, in a downtown strip joint from which he successfully delivers her. He takes her back home, lands a new recording and publishing contract, and the two presumably live happily ever after. Or so the artificial and utterly implausible ending would seem to imply. (Desmond Howl is very clear-witted and a clever conversationalist for a guy who can barely tie his shoelaces, and will probably have a hit on his hands with his whale music album.)

“Whale Music” is stylishly and inventively written, often charming and certainly entertaining. But the subject matter, in my opinion, is ill-conceived. Why write about a burned-out rock star who never made it into any 12-step program? And why so thinly veiled this fictionalized account? I would have felt more comfortable with either straight biography or a new set of characters not so transparently linked to real people, dead or alive.

Don’t misunderstand me. “Whale Music” is dazzling prose. At the beginning of the book--which the author calls “a novel, sort of”--Desmond Howl reflects on his and his brother’s lives: “We were all of us born too late, that’s a sad fact.

“This age is a strange new neighborhood, cheaply constructed and stuck out in the middle of nowhere. None of us belongs. Daniel should have been a medieval warlord. Dan-Dan should have wandered throughout the barren earthworks, a butt of malmsey in his paw, tweaking the bosoms of handmaids . . .” At times like this, the narrative resembles an existential portrait out of Heidegger.

The fact that I’m not enamored of the Beach Boys and don’t give a hoot if I ever hear a Beach Boys song again no doubt colored my lack of appreciation for “Whale Music.” I’m probably in the minority.

If you’ve followed popular music and the lives of the people making it, “Whale Music” is a witty, offbeat little tale that you might just love.