What is "quippy"?

You tell from the title alone of David Gilbert's near-current New Yorker story, Member/Guest, that he's a clever writer who pushes across boundaries and defies expectations. I don't know anything about his work other than this story and the bio blurb in the issue, which noted that his forthcoming novel is called & Sons. Smart and enticing. But about Member/Guest - it does push boundaries, and it makes me wonder: Is this a story, or not? On the surface, it's about a quartet of girls, basically spoiled and mean New York girls summering in the Hamptons with their insufferable parents. They're at a beach club, and, over the course of the story, the first, squabble and quarrel, then the main character, the not very attractive but pretty smart Becket converses with her parents, then she drifts over to the clubhouse and has a conversation (for the first time) with the 40ish guy whose job is to admit members (and their guests) and to turn away hoi polloi who wander in from the beach. After talking with him, Becket rejoins her friends, they go for a swim, kind of threaten one another in a snide but playful way, and then race toward the shore. End of story. What's up with this? First of all, the writing is admirable and witty in that particular New Yorker style - I call it "quippy" - characters trade quips are improbably clever for the level of perception and intelligence that the characters actually evince, which of course makes us understand that it's the writer, not his characters, who are the clever ones (the best writers convince us that their characters are more clever than they are! - q.v., Lorrie Moore). I don't for a moment believe these girls would trade quips about the Aeneus, let alone quote poems in Latin - but there you go. We've long ago given up on the idea that a story must have an arc of a plot - it need not, but if not, it needs to have some kind of design, building toward a perception, an emotion, an observation, or a transformation of character. A great story cannot be just a succession of things that happen - and I'm afraid that's what we're dealing with in Member/Guest. There's less here than meets the eye - unless, as with so many NYer fiction selections - this is a snippet of a longer work in which we would see these characters interact, conflict, and evolve. There are hints of deeper meanings: the guest-checker is a potentially interesting and weird character, and I wonder if he has some classical counterpart, not Charybdis but some figure who determines, on instinct alone, who gains entrance and who is turned away at the gates. The story doesn't make much of this symbol or metaphor, but, again, maybe that's something Gilbert develops further elsewhere. I don't consider this story a great success and am not sure why the editors selected this from the vast field of world fiction, but I would read more by Gilbert, as he's obviously an intelligent and funny writer, with plenty of trenchant observations about a certain set, albeit a dislikable one.