A week in books: Art against money in Cape Cod

Escaping a still vaguely depressed New York for the lighter air of Cape Cod, America's literati have found themselves diverted by a seaside sensation this summer. Ever since Eugene O'Neill initiated a ménage à trois and sunbathed nude on its dunes in the 1910s, Provincetown in Massachusetts has been wreathed in art, scandal and intrigue. Painters such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko occupied its shacks and cottages; stage people from Tennessee Williams and Marlon Brando to Judy Garland and Billie Holiday drank and performed in its seamen's bars. Provincetown, a home from home for Greenwich Villagers, has long been acknowledged as a haven for transgressive behaviour.

Now this scorpion's tail of land, surrounded on three sides by sea, faces a new outrage. The source of the fuss is a pair of publications – one just out, the other imminent – vehemently opposed to each other, and already the subject of fierce debate and salacious gossip in this two-street town at the end of Cape Cod. The first is Peter Manso's P-town: Art, Sex, and Money on the Outer Cape, a scandal-filled tome from the biographer of Norman Mailer and Marlon Brando. The other, Michael Cunningham's Land's End: A Walk Through Provincetown, comes from the Pulitzer-winning novelist whose The Hours has just been filmed, starring Nicole Kidman and Meryl Streep.

The two books could not take more contrasting attitudes to this bohemian town, a kind of cross between high-season Brighton and intellectual Bloomsbury. Within one block, you can pass residences of cult film directors, fine artists, acclaimed poets and best-selling novelists. In the deli, I found myself recently standing between Joely Richardson and Helena Kennedy. Meanwhile, down the street, a kind of gay bacchanalia is in progress, with tall men dressed as Barbra Streisand, and lesbians in crewcuts. The Pilgrim fathers made their first landing here, not Plymouth – but were driven off by the residents.

Peter Manso's book rails against what he sees as the gay-yuppiefication of the place, with the pink dollar set to squeeze out every trace of its artistic past. Cunningham's delights in a town where gay sex takes place in the dunes (a scene he portrays as idyllic, with frolicking satyrs out of Greek myth). Manso decries the fact that, in a town of 3,500, there was just one birth in the year 2001; Cunningham gives you the low-down on the gay aristocracy and their exquisite renovations of whaling cottages. Inevitably, Manso – the son of a Provincetown artist – has been accused of rampant homophobia. The gay clique hymned by Cunningham stands similarly accused of rampant consumerism, and of turning the clapboard town into one big chunk of prime real estate.

The summer debate rose to fever pitch with letters to The New York Times by long-time resident Norman Mailer, affronted by Manso's allegations. (The antipathy has its roots in Manso's unflattering biography of Mailer.) Sitting in one of the town's only straight bars, it was instructive to hear one barfly passionately defending Mailer – though he admitted that the writer referred to women as "gashes". It was a contrast to the parting I overheard between two town lesbians earlier that day: "Nice eating you."

A young local-born (straight) man took me sailing in the bay. Phlegmatically, he shrugged off the sexual politics, pausing only to note that at high school, the football team "always got called 'fags' when we played out of town. The matches ended up in fist fights". With Manso and Cunningham's books, the fights look set to continue, in a complicated choreography of art against money.