TALES OF THREE CITIES

By JAMES COLLINS

Cities and novelists seem to have a special, symbiotic relationship. No other literary form can render a city as richly as the novel can, and probably no other setting--sprawling, crisscrossed with relationships, randomly cruel and beautiful--better suits the novel's strengths. Certainly, masterpieces have been written about smaller communities, but the correspondence between city and novelist is unique, and so it is that we refer to Dickens' London, Balzac's Paris, Joyce's Dublin.

Three new American novels that are not of quite the same quality as those by the authors mentioned above nonetheless hope to update this tradition. One is superb; another, which could easily have been dismissed as a curiosity, has surprising merit; while the third, the most eagerly anticipated of the three, falls well short of expectations. The cities: Los Angeles, Washington and New York. The books: I'm Losing You by Bruce Wagner (Villard; 319 pages; $23), Powertown by Michael Lind (HarperCollins; 264 pages; $23) and Manhattan Nocturne by Colin Harrison (Crown; 355 pages; $24). The themes: sex, power and degradation; sex, racism and violence; sex, murder and a 300-lb. version of Rupert Murdoch.

One approaches I'm Losing You somewhat cautiously, since serious Hollywood novels tend to hit the same keys--decadence, emptiness, bad faith. There's an essential hypocrisy to these sorts of books. While they self-importantly lay bare the meaninglessness of celebrity worship, they simultaneously exploit that very failing--an insatiable desire to read about the movie business. For I'm Losing You, Wagner has indeed rounded up the usual suspects: nihilistic agents, pornographers, washed-up producers, depraved plastic surgeons. And they are indeed doing the usual things: having soulless sex, taking drugs, using each other. Nevertheless, Wagner has written a novel of disciplined excess, with beautifully concentrated prose and a sometimes heartbreaking polyphony of voices.

The intertwining story lines hardly accommodate a summary. Donny Ribkin, the reptilian agent, longs for his ex-wife, who has taken up with a female novelist--his love for her continues "to grow, like nails on a corpse"; Zev Turtletaub, a brutalizing, gay producer, fantastically successful, is developing a modern adaptation of Gogol's Dead Souls to star Alec Baldwin; casting director Sara Radisson-Stein gives birth to a son who is blind, and she writes moving letters to him ("I'm sitting beside you as I write; the faintest light falls upon your marzipan cheek. You're the sweetest plum..."), while her TV-producer husband descends into crack addiction. The content of Wagner's satire of Hollywood is not particularly fresh, and the sexual grotesques that fill his book are the common currency of fiction these days. But the particulars of the author's images, tones and language give I'm Losing You a hard beauty that glints like a black crystal.

Is there no one in Michael Lind's family to tell him to slow down? Less than two years ago, Lind wrote an article for the leftist magazine Dissent in which he rejected the conservative ideology that he had been serving for the previous few years as a writer and an editor. Suddenly, pieces by Lind appeared everywhere. A book of political analysis came out last year, and he published another a couple of months ago. Meanwhile, he flitted from a job at Harper's to one at the New Republic to one at the New Yorker. Now he has written a novel, probably the first ever that was preceded in its author's oeuvre by a book containing the entry "Dukakis, Michael" in its index.

Powertown is not a great novel, but it is winning and likeable and shows flashes of literary talent. The title seems to be ironic, for the characters here are not the Senate barons of the typical Washington novel but more marginal figures who are no less indigenous to the city. Like Wagner, Lind interweaves his characters' stories, their lives occasionally touching one another. Stef Schonfeld, in her late 20s, loses her lowly job on the Hill and joins the political journal Perspective. Ross Drummond is a successful Republican lobbyist who is gay, like some of his mentors. The life of Evander Johnson, a black teenager, tips from innocence into drugs and violence.

The satire of what Lind really knows--a magazine like Perspective, for example--is pointed and funny. But he manages to make imaginative leaps well beyond his own world (maybe his transformation from conservative to liberal has given him practice). If his portrayal of the lives of poor blacks is not perfectly accurate--he is after all a white, junior-varsity pundit--it is credible enough, and Lind's ambition and compassion are to be admired. Only occasionally does the policy wonk intrude: Evander's uncle notices that at an elementary school, "Half, or perhaps more, of the kids he speaks to have no fathers at home."

Finally, the disappointment. Colin Harrison has received high praise for two literary thrillers, Bodies Electric and Break and Enter, and Manhattan Nocturne is another work in that genre. It is smoothly written but succeeds neither as murder mystery nor as art. A columnist writing for a tabloid owned by the Murdoch caricature becomes involved--naturally--with a beautiful woman whom he trusts at his peril. Complications ensue. The plot is not particularly absorbing, the stakes are not particularly high, and the occasional passages that advert to matters like Character and Fate, while not horribly overblown, are not particularly profound. The book seems to have been written by someone with talent whose engine is on idle.

Manhattan Nocturne gains some life and color simply on account of its backdrop: New York City. But for the partnership between a city and a novel to work, the novelist must make the rhythms and textures of the town as vivid as his characters, and inseparable from them. Wagner and even Lind succeed in this. In Manhattan Nocturne, on the other hand, New York is simply an attractive vessel that holds indifferent wine.