“At Least in the City Someone Would Hear Me Scream” by Wade Rouse (Harmony Books, 320 pgs., $24)

It may be a bit early to start recommending this summer’s beach reading, but if one is looking for laughs, Wade Rouse’s “At Least in the City Someone Would Hear Me Scream” belongs at the top of your list.

Rouse and his partner, Gary, a sometimes in-your-face gay couple, move from St. Louis to a woodsy cottage about a mile from the beach in Saugatuck. Why? Because Rouse has dreams of becoming a modern-day Thoreau. His goal is “To find myself, to find my modern-day Walden Pond, by stripping away superfluous luxuries and living a plainer, simpler life.” Gary is skeptical, but other than an occasional Paul Lynde-caustic comment, is a fairly good sport about it.

Rouse, whose big-city life has hitherto been immersed in trendy clothes (“I consider Kenneth Cole to be on par with Gandhi for his contributions to the world”), trendy foods, trendy events and oh-God-he-misses-Starbucks, is very much a fish out of water.

The account of their rustic vicissitudes could’ve been related by almost any good writer — but then it would’ve been just another humorous story. It is their very gayness — Rouse’s particularly — that is the yeast, the tang that makes their rustic adventures laugh-out-loud hilarious. The chapter about their meeting with rural mullet-haired punks is worth the price of admission.

They survive winter, the forest critters and the neighbors with night-vision binoculars. Occasionally, they even meet a local “whose hobbies don’t require ammunition.”

Rouse resembles a hyperactive child in his attempts to achieve a Walden-like nirvana, which may be why he writes like Bob Hope entertaining the troops. Possibly it’s a defense mechanism: joking about hurtful things to keep from letting on how deeply he feels them and how much they do hurt.