AN AVAILABLE MAN <i> by Patric Kuh (Ballantine Books/Available Press: $8.95 paper; 258 pp.) </i>

It’s easy to dismiss contemporary novels about young people with too much time on their hands, who pass their days--well, nights, usually--taking drugs, hanging out at bars and clubs, to whom being beat up by a drug dealer is a form of excitement because it at least relieves the boredom. But how are these novels different from those written by Gertrude Stein’s “lost generation”? Doesn’t the last line of dialogue in “The Sun Also Rises”--”Isn’t it pretty to think so?”--contain all the sentimental emptiness of Jay McInerney’s “Bright Lights, Big City”?

Patric Kuh has written a new kind of expatriate novel, much closer in spirit to the lost generation, but with the trappings of the lost yuppie generation. “An Available Man” is the story of Francis, a gigolo who gets along in Paris hustling rich women who come on shopping sprees. He’s cultured; he tells his more squeamish ladies that he’s a starving artist, to make the financial transaction more palatable. His professional approach begins with a tour of the City of Light, but ends with the inevitable cigarette smoked at dawn by an anonymous hotel window, waiting for the lady to wake up and discreetly check her valuables.

Francis, too, has his Brett Ashley: Emma, a Texas oil heiress, beautiful, spoiled, chronically bored and an irretrievable junkie. Kuh’s plot is propelled--somewhat shakily--by Emma’s father, who hires Francis to do what he wants to do most in the world, but has already failed to do once: care for Emma. She, predictably, leads the men on a roller-coaster ride through the slummiest clubs of Paris and Texas.

Kuh’s sensuous descriptions of Paris at sunset and at dawn alone set his book apart from run-of-the-mill tales of sex-drugs-etc. But there is also a depth and a richness to the despair that recalls the older novels. (Kuh gracefully manages, however, to avoid overt references; nostalgia for “the old days” for Francis and Emma consists in a walk through Pere Lachaise cemetery, where constant vigil is kept at rock star Jim Morrison’s grave.) The McInerneyesque heroes, even if they manage to kill themselves with an overdose of the good life, always convey the pervasive American confidence that there’s more where this came from. But Kuh’s characters do hit bottom, and even though he spares us the awakening at the end--or perhaps because he does--there’s a genuine sense of redemption.