A Scarlet O’Hara : THE RULES OF SEDUCTION, By Daniel L. Magida ; (Houghton Mifflin: $21.95; 422 pp.)

About 35 years ago John O’Hara’s work fell out of favor with New York’s literary Establishment, which was losing interest in WASPs (O’Hara’s universe was bounded by Back Bay Boston on the north and the Philadelphia Main Line on the south, with an occasional stop in Gibbsville, Pa.) and embracing work about a grittier, urban (read Jewish, black) world.

I mention this because I was struck, reading Daniel Magida’s compelling account of a young man’s coming of age, at the strange contemporary intersection of old money and New York ennui (the world of downtown nightclubs, cocaine and casual bisexuality), that it is not unlike O’Hara. I mean that to be a serious compliment.

Magida tells us the story of John Newland’s 28th birthday, the date when the trusts established for him terminate. Newland has been carrying around some heavy baggage for 13 years: His parents were killed in a car crash one summer evening, returning from a dinner party with his lawyer father’s most important client, a party young John refused to attend.

His father had been the sort to play ball or ice hockey with him even after having more than a few drinks; his mother would read him Robert Frost “and then discuss with him whether good fences in fact make good neighbors.” It was a childhood world of genteel (not to mention Gentile) privilege, of proper schools, dancing classes, and most of all, a sense of societal place.

All of this prepares him to prowl the New York streets as a magazine writer. The outfit he works for is “the plaything of a rich lady of a certain age, whose goal was to own a publication that none of her friends would read (though all of them did).” Newland writes about movies and also covers, with a lot of what New Yorkers proudly call “attitude,” cultural events of a sort to which he is invited because of his family background.

His curse is to be intelligent and burdened with the constricted expectations of his class. Then there is the problem of his looks: His swimmer’s body and gorgeous green eyes make him attractive to both men and women. He only rarely accedes to the desires of the former, more often to the latter. The title of the book, far more risque than its content, refers to Newland’s practice of not initiating sexual encounters.

Newland has agreed, more from psychic inertia than from passion, to become engaged to a beautiful woman who seems, to anyone who has spent a lifetime reading the society announcements in the New York Times, to be the perfect match: Kate Welland, the daughter of the head of the bank that administers Newland’s family trust. In Kate’s world, “men worked and women arranged. Even when women worked, they worked at jobs that were just another form of arranging, like Kate’s job publishing art books, setting up gallery shows.”

Kate is off on a two-week trip to Switzerland when Newland’s birthday rolls around. He reluctantly celebrates with friends in a club, alternating glasses of Wild Turkey and lines of cocaine in the men’s room. Disgusted with himself, he flees. After he passes out, Timothy, one of his friends, takes him to a vacation house in the area of northwestern Connecticut where Newland’s family used to summer.

When Newland wakes up, sober, he decides to stay on with his friend, and then, suddenly, falls in love with Timothy’s sister Ellen, who is almost as beautiful as Kate, and almost as socially well-connected. Ellen has something over Kate: a Ph.D. and a serious career as a physicist.

“The Rules of Seduction” is about the decision Newland must make between the two women, and his discovery that his editor values his talent more than his social connections. But it is also about his finally coming to grips with his parents’ death, and the part he feels he played in it.

It would be unfair to such an admirable book to reveal the ending, even if I wish it had been less ambiguous. Magida’s world, like O’Hara’s, is one of Eastern wealth and manners, which continues to fascinate because it is the universe that controls most of our Eastern banks, major corporations and (in the case of George Bush) our government. But it also reminds us that there is no similar tradition of fiction about the social axis from Hillsborough and Stanford in northern California to San Marino and USC in the south. In Los Angeles, that is our loss, even as Magida’s novel is our gain.