The American Scheme : BAD BUSINESS: A Novel, <i> By Nancy Goldstone (Faber & Faber: $18.95; 229 pp.)</i>

Julie Wilson, a sort of Cosmo proto-ad woman, has a problem. In fact, a few problems: Her roommate is a scheming maniac with a punk hairdo (and editor of the contemporary classic “Spineless--Why Men Won’t Commit”). Her “boyfriend” is a scheming, passionless, self-obsessed investment banker. Her mother is a ghastly caricature of a Jewish mom, manipulative, critical, and not listening. But worst of all--and this is really bad--her advertising agency is in deep doo-doo, and it may just not be possible for her to be a successful copywriter or account executive.

More or less by accident, she hits upon a clever idea: Why not pitch the U.S. Treasury Department to be a client to create a campaign against a certain congressional groundswell for a bill--the Nolan amendment--which would simply flatly bar the import of Nipponese cars.

The idea is a complete success. Julie’s career blossoms. She finds the man of her dreams--a Treasury Department economist who is also made of poured concrete, is a nonstop love machine, is brilliant, and has real principles. In the end, advertising for government policies takes the government by storm. But this only further cheapens and trivializes government policy-making, and Julie leaves her wealth and power far behind to help her ex-bureaucrat lover fight against the further debasement of politics and economics in Washington.

Now, it would be easy to point out how trivial much of this novel is: cartoonish characters, a comically erroneous contempt for the people who run Capitol Hill, a replay of one cliche after another about money and power restaurants. It would be easy to take all of these together and dismiss Nancy Goldstone’s first novel. It would be easy, as my former boss said, but it would be wrong, and that’s for sure.

The fact is that this novel is a cartoon, but it is a great cartoon, and a really fine, and even important, novel anyway. It’s fine and it’s important because it uses its readily accessible form to make some quite basic and vital points about American life.

First, and this is really important, author Goldstone is said to be a former “options trader” (options on what?) at a large New York bank. In that job or nearby, she clearly learned what “investment bankers” are. She paints them, very correctly, as a group of cigar-smoking thugs, stealing from clients with no more ethical base than a gutter rat.

Her view of them as the Wall Street analogue of rack jobbers or numbers runners is right on target, incomparably more so than Tom Wolfe’s hilarious but not factual view in “Bonfire of the Vanities.” For this alone, readers generally owe her a vote of thanks.

Second, Goldstone really has a deft gift for showing, in just a few words, how utterly self-obsessed the policy-makers of this world are.

Her notion that the use of advertising in pushing public policy is new is startlingly mistaken--where does she think Bob Haldeman came from?--but her use of that as a metaphor for how self-interest has become the only touchstone of policy at almost every government level is brilliant. Her scene of the head of the Federal Reserve being sold on a commercial that sells exactly the opposite of his real goals just so he can be liked is almost scary.

Third, Goldstone’s characters are cartoonish, but they are deft cartoons of what we have all become. Her “having it all” women are a mockery even to themselves. She has created what may be some of the most memorable anti-feminist women in recent years, memorable because their eyes are open, which is saying a lot in this world. Her bosses and competitors are comic-book types, but they are real comic-book types, Doonesbury nightmare cellmates in the prison blocks they call office buildings.

But beyond her preceptorial function, and this is rarest of all, Goldstone can write. Her sentences are clean, flowing, intelligent, even arch. This is not the tortured work of the wealthy Valley housewife seeking to make a buck at a sex-and-money novel because a friend at her country club did the same. This Goldstone woman has a talent that you cannot buy to express herself naturally and cleanly in the English language. This is frighteningly rare, and much to be praised when it appears.

“Bad Business” is a book to learn from, by a woman to watch.