BOOK REVIEW : Rich Satire Throbs With Frothy Energy : DOCTOR CRIMINALE <i> by Malcolm Bradbury</i> ; Viking; $22; 344 pages

Back in those heady late 1980s at Sussex University, it was very heaven to be alive and an English major.

“We demythologized,” Francis Jay tells us. “We demystified. We dehegemonized, we decanonized, we dephallicized, we depatriarchalized, we decoded, we deconstructed.” All too soon, it came time to graduate and earn a living. Young Jay ventured that he might join the Army but, his tutor countered, “If it was random violence I was after, why not go into literary journalism?”

And so he has, at the start of Malcolm Bradbury’s richly satiric new novel. Literary journalism in the tight world of London is like tossing boomerangs in a crowded elevator; somebody gets it in the eye every time. It is smart, it is fun, it takes Jay to the right parties, it keeps him afloat in the froth of the times. It gets him an assignment to prepare a television show on Europe’s most formidable man of letters, a figure as mythic and glamorous as Jean-Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes, Elias Canetti and Gyorgy Lukacs rolled into one.

Like Jay’s journalism, satire needs to be in the froth of the times or it goes flat. Bradbury, author of “Eating People Is Wrong” and “Rates of Exchange,” skewers the trends of his intellectuals almost before they have taken course. “Doctor Criminale”--the name of Jay’s quarry as well as of the book--is wonderfully frothy, but it is quite a bit more.

Criminale, author of indispensable novels, plays and philosophical treatises, is seminal and a touch seedy. He is constantly in the news--in his study, when we get to it, are intimately inscribed photographs from Stalin, Nixon, Brecht and Madonna--yet all that is known of his personal life is that he was born in Bulgaria, lived in Hungary and jets lavishly from conference to conference. Jay researches his work, but the TV producer wants juicy details: “I expect that if you turn over a modern master, you’ll find a modern mistress.”

And so, Jay sets out on a quest that will take him to Austria, Hungary, an Italian lake resort, Lausanne, Brussels and one or two other places. All he has to start with is a biographical fragment by a Viennese professor, Otto Codicil. Codicil invites him to pastry and coffee--”I am happy to slap up the tab”--but is mysteriously hostile.

Codicil’s resentful assistant puts Jay on to a Budapest scholar who he insists is the fragment’s real author. (In fact, the authorship is successively attributed to various people as the book goes on, including Criminale himself.) The Hungarian, in these post-Communist ‘90s, has given up philosophy to become a prosperous fixer.

He turns Jay over to the beautiful Ildiko Hazy, Criminale’s publisher and one of his many former lovers. Hazy welcomes Jay and his expense account into her bed and has him take her to a conference on a lake in Italy, where Criminale makes his appearance along with such usual-suspect luminaries as Susan Sontag and Gunther Grass.

The pursuit continues to Lausanne, which Criminale visits before flying to India. Hazy vanishes in a different direction, after clearing out six Criminale bank accounts. She leaves Jay a farewell present of $50,000 in Swiss bank notes and an affectionate message urging him to be “more Hungarian.”

Jay’s investigation takes him farther: to Buenos Aires, where he meets a fervently Stalinist ex-wife of Criminale’s, and to Brussels, where Cosima, a formidable German financial investigator for the European Community, takes him to bed after tidily vacuuming. She enlightens him on the fungible flow of ideas, principles and money in the New Europe.

Some of the comedy is heavy-handed and drawn-out. But Bradbury writes with splendid energy and a fertile mind. There is sheer pleasure in Jay’s travels around Europe; we get the stubborn and refreshing idiosyncrasies that persist, country by country, amid the uncertain moves toward unification.

As in any satire, most of the characters are amiable caricatures. But Hazy, beguilingly various, becomes one of the voices of the book’s larger reflections. After the Communist era in Eastern and Central Europe, freedom is money; it is shopping. Cosima suggests what hasn’t changed all along. Stalinists, liberal revisionists or new democrats: Hard currency has always been the key to power.

If Criminale is elusive, it is because he represents long survival through Europe’s bloody contradictions. He has served all sides: The hard and soft lines in Hungary, the intellectual and material freedoms of the West and the underground complicities between Europe’s two halves. He has traveled freely all these years; his Swiss bank accounts have been a convenience not only to himself but to the authorities in his country.

His ideas and theories have been equivalently polymorphous, embracing opposites, denying the objective reality of thought, prizing its fluid interpretations. “The philosopher is only the clown of thought,” he tells Jay at the end. “He is granted the role of wisdom. He must appear wise.”

In a way, Bradbury is satirizing the deconstructionist and relativist fashions in current critical and linguistic philosophy. Yet his portrait of Criminale is ultimately sympathetic. In his clownish versatility, he is an honest, even humble representation of the odd thing that our world has, in fact, become.