The End of Morality : AMONG THE DEAD, <i> By Michael Tolkin (William Morrow: $20; 273 pp.)</i>

The surest sign that Michael Tolkin is on to something new in “Among the Dead” is that there hasn’t yet been a term invented to describe the novel’s central figure, Frank Gale. Hero is definitely out, but antihero doesn’t quite get at it, either. Perhaps non-hero might be a nod in the right direction. Even just protagonist doesn’t seem to fit: Gale, a moderately successful Southern California record producer, initiates no real action, except by accident (“Nothing you do is important,” his wife tells him). He doesn’t even really react much to action when it does happen.

Frank misses a flight to Mexico with his wife and 3-year-old daughter (for whom he doesn’t seem to have particularly strong feelings of any kind); he was delayed by a cheerless lunch with his mistress where he broke off their affair (her strongest response is “Oh, dear”). His intention is to patch up his marriage while on vacation, for the purpose of which he has enclosed a letter in their luggage, a letter confessing all in detail and asking for forgiveness. The letter is written with more painstaking care than Frank will lavish on anything else in his life: “Something in the letter made him happy as he copied it. . . . Usually he wrote in a scrawl, but now each letter was separately crafted.” It’s elegant and humble, a masterpiece of shallow sincerity.

There seems to be no particular motive for Frank’s attempt to save the marriage, or, for that matter, for having taken a mistress in the first place. He seems to be trying to do something right, but not especially because he thinks it right. In fact, he seems to lack a moral sense entirely. Later, after events that in a different novel might be called tragic, he asks himself: “Why did I construct this stupid drama? If I had let things alone, I could have kept (the mistress), and my family would still be alive.”

In the hands of a novelist who was merely cynical, the point might be something like “No good deed goes unpunished,” but Tolkin’s startlingly original novel aims at nothing so banal. Although the plot twists in “Among the Dead” are morbidly amusing (remember the letter), no matter what path Frank takes in this labyrinth, he would meet the same fate: his own character (Compared to Frank, Robert Musil’s feckless “Man Without Qualities” looks like Carl Sandburg’s Lincoln).

While waiting in the airport for a flight that will send him to Mexico to join his family, Frank and the rest of the passengers are held up by a crying woman. Sensing a tragedy (not knowing it is one he shares) and delighted with his perception, he muses that “he could have strolled with a certain insolence through the nodes of now-frustrated travelers, offering them his observation and letting the truth sink in, so they would regret their tantrums, and instead offer condolence to the woman just touched by death.”

His own noble feelings are an inch deep. When Frank finds he’s been touched by death, he feels not a sense of tragedy but of moral release. While a woman representing the airline explains to him the extent of the disaster, he has a sudden desire to rape her: “(H)e could taste immortality, no one could punish him for anything, he had the king’s right to take whatever he wanted, because he was superior in ways only dimly imaginable to someone as common as this cheap groupie in a dead-end job.”

He considers religion, but not as a consolation: “Frank wanted to leave God out of this. Frank felt that it was important to protect God right now and not blame Him for the crash. He might need God soon and didn’t want to give Him an excuse to bargain with his prayers.” Frank is ready to negotiate with God.

There’s a clue to Frank (and to all of Tolkin’s work so far) in the fantasy rape of the airline representative: When he tries just a moment later to recreate the impulse, “there was no pressure behind the fantasy; the image seemed borrowed.”

Frank is vaguely aware that he’d “like to feel more,” but he doesn’t know how. Soon, he begins to “create his grief for public consumption.” He enjoys the pity he’s getting and wonders if it’ll help him get a particular cousin into bed. “At last,” he tells himself, “I’m interesting.” And, finally: “So, I’m a monster.”

Frank is kidding himself on both counts. He’s groping for proper responses, and everything he comes up with is secondhand. Tolkin’s characters aren’t monsters; if they were, we wouldn’t recognize them. From the Jesus-obsessed phone operator played by Mimi Rogers in Tolkin’s intriguing film “The Rapture” to “The Player’s” Griffin Mill to “Among the Dead’s” Frank Gale, these are simply normal people (which is the truly terrifying part) who are spiritually vapid. This is how they act, and therefore, how we act: In moments of crisis they punch buttons marked “soul”--and what flashes before them are stale, received images out of popular culture.

Tolkin’s novel, “The Player,” is much more than an appendage to Altman’s film; it’s darker and richer, and its ideas are more expansive. In the film, movie executive Mill murders a writer he suspects of sending him anonymous, threatening postcards. The murder seems as absurd and unmotivated as Meursault’s shooting of the Arab in Albert Camus’ “The Stranger.” But Tolkin’s novel offers a subtlety missing from the film: There is a suggestion that the violence is a delayed reaction to watching “The Bicycle Thief,” to the feelings it stirs in Mill that he doesn’t know how to deal with. Mill identifies the writer, all writers, with these feelings he wants to expunge: What’s not immediately accessible, what can’t be easily grasped, must be expelled. Finally, “Griffin wanted the last words the writer would ever hear to be the player’s credo: ‘I love the audience, I am the audience.’ ” He kills (as does the woman in “The Rapture”) because of an excess of shallowness.

And like Frank Gale, he’s cut off from his own instincts. He sees himself in third person, in movie terms. While strangling the writer “he saw what it was to choke a man to death.” When he tries to recall the murder, the image is “too neat and mechanical.”

The central figures in both of Tolkin’s amazing novels merge on a telling point: They doubt their own stories will make good movies. Griffin Mill thinks his motive for murder is too ambiguous. And Frank Gale wonders: “Could anyone buy this as a movie? Or is it too internal?”

Tolkin is being facetious with us there, but he’s earned the right. He has brought the techniques of a good thriller movie--the intricate, rapidly developing plot, the snappy, evocative dialogue--to a novel that can’t possibly, according to its own fictional entertainment-industry expertise, be made into a film.

And, of course, it will probably be made into a film anyway.