We Have Met the Publisher, and He Is Us : BECOMING THE ENEMY: <i> by Brenda Peterson (Graywolf Press: $17.50; 272 pp.; 1-55597-104-0)</i>

Young people fortunate enough to find work in trade publishing can persuade themselves that it is a sort of religious order, that they have renounced commerce and taken vows to the god of aesthetics.

A few decades ago, when conglomerates took an interest in publishing firms and their bottom lines became a matter of importance, the function of an editor singled into acquiring books that sell. Never mind the good books. For the editorial novitiate it was as if the devil himself had taken charge.

This confrontation of good and evil strikes the literary person as just the fuel for a novel, and Brenda Peterson’s “Becoming the Enemy” is a case in point.

Lauren Meyer is the young woman who comes up from the South seeking spiritual fulfillment plus employment as a typist at Cowley & Pelzner, the distinguished New York house that, a century ago, published Herman Melville.

Lauren gets the job, but once within the sanctum, she finds Mercer Corp., whose previous experience has been with oil and auto parts, reorganizing the editorial department by retiring its sages, de-emphasizing the heavy consumption of English breakfast tea, and demanding a more profitable list.

It is not much of a contest. The big guns from Mercer follow their business school training, streamline the place and, for all we know, run up the share price to the stockholders’ satisfaction.

Meantime the author directs our attention to the devoted entourage of one of the casualties, literary, senior editor, Daniel Sorenson. These include Hella Steinhardt, loyal assistant and former mistress; Ruth Littlefield, admiring fellow-editor, and Joseph Girard, an aspiring author.

Lauren is also at work on a novel, and when she accepts Ruth’s invitation to quit the 92nd Street Y and move into her Park Avenue apartment, Lauren is drawn into the pattern of her life.

It seems that Joseph and Ruth have been living together, but he is no longer the ardent lover Ruth would like. Lauren consoles her with a profoundly satisfying massage, and their relationship deepens. However, when Joseph is attracted to Lauren, she betrays her relationship with Ruth to have an affair with him.

As if this were not complication enough, Joseph’s weekly editorial session with Daniel Sorenson becomes a sexual one and culminates in Sorenson’s near-fatal heart attack.

It is the faithful Hella who looks after his recovery, then guides him and Ruth into launching Pleiades, the modest, quality publishing venture in a Brooklyn brownstone. This, the dream of many a wistful editor, provides some faint hope for the survival of literary virtue in its tussle with the almighty buck.

But that tussle has never really engaged us, which is a great pity. It is as if Peterson sensed her readers would not be properly horrified by those scoundrels from Mercer and their fiendish plan to increase the dividend and so passed up the dramatic possibilities in the corridors of Cowley & Pelzner.

Moreover, instead of revealing her characters in the art-versus-commerce struggle, she has chosen to do so in their after-hours lives. The narrative waits while, one-by-one, the earnest literary figures are introduced.

In Ruth Littlefield’s full-length portrait, we learn about her prosperous, love-starved childhood and her early wish to be a nun. Lauren Meyer shows her Southern origins and need to atone for the blighted yearnings of her mother’s life. Joseph Girard reveals inherited scars from the Holocaust.

It is a bold stroke indeed to tell the story of Joseph’s father and the ordeal at Auschwitz, which resulted in his maimed hands, through a sample of Joseph’s autobiographical fiction. Likewise, we learn about Lauren’s mother’s unpublished novel and beloved leopard coat, through a sample of Lauren’s novel.

But however well we get to know the principals in “Becoming the Enemy,” follow their turns in the sexual “round,” which is the novel’s central narrative, and suffer its painful consequences, neither the publishing nor the personal issues are resolved.

The author suggests that her trio of junior publishers have finally accepted themselves as comrades of passage, but they have failed to generate any satisfactory love between them. Nor does it seem that their coming together at Cowley & Pelzner has added to an understanding of purpose or self. “Becoming the Enemy” leaves room for the definitive novel about contemporary publishing.