Pen Envy : The baroque obsessions of an unpublishable writer-character : THE INFORMATION, <i> By Martin Amis (Crown Publishing: $24; 374 pp.)</i>

The best-known male writers of Britain’s postwar period wrote of a zero-sum island where rancor was the leading literary theme. The women writers, meanwhile, were beginning to find ways to move on: Iris Murdoch through pagan myth, Muriel Spark and Penelope Fitzgerald through different kinds of humor with a similar root in sadness.

In retrospect, perhaps “angry young men” was not quite the right term for John Osborne, Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and their contemporaries. Anger carries the implication that it will change something; in their case it was more a matter of chained resentment. The chains were rattled wonderfully well, sometimes; and the result was a stagy vitality that found its strongest expression, in fact, with the renaissance of British theater in the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s.

Murdoch, Spark and Fitzgerald kept on writing, and some of their freest and finest work has come in the past dozen years. Most of those male writers have died or fallen silent; only Amis, at a rate of a novel every couple of years, keeps on rattling his chain. Chains, of course, have two ends. Amis, moving to the right, has long since done his rattling from the proprietor’s end while complaining about the help.

In the case of Kingsley’s son, Martin Amis, the complaining has been passed right along, as well as the chain end. His writing is fancier, with an assortment of surreal and post-modern touches, and it is better paid--the size of the advance for his latest book set off a literary firestorm in London--but the family resemblance is overwhelming.

Both father and son write of intellectual phonies and pretenders, assorted degenerates and a rotted-out youth in an England of depraved popular culture and not the slightest social or moral structure. Martin portrays them more monstrously, but the outlook is remarkably similar.

Like his father, Martin Amis is dark, satirical and gifted with irascibility. But what we get under the satire is not a sense of protest but of contempt. It aims not so much to denounce the world in order to uplift it, as to exclude the world in order to uplift the writer and the circle he thinks he is addressing. With the Amises it has become less and less evident whom that circle includes. It is like standing with someone at a party and being talked above, or perhaps below, or perhaps the talker is talking to himself, more and more wordily.

Accumulating prolixity enfolds and deadens the witty turns and phrases that both writers are capable of producing. What has dwindled is an author’s curiosity about his characters. In Kingsley’s early work--”Lucky Jim,” “Take a Girl Like You”--this curiosity was exhilarating; with Martin it has never seemed very strong. He can create striking figures, but they emerge full-blown from their author’s head, and begin to stiffen from that moment on.

They are stiff as straws, for the most part, in “The Information.” Like his last big novel, “London Fields,” it is a satirical jeremiad, a distant descendant of Trollope’s very dark “How We Live Now.” Jeremiah operates on a smaller scale than in “Fields’ ” panorama of a London in moral and material flames and ashes. Here the sprawling desolation of the times is strung onto a tiny ingrown framework.

“The Information” is powered by envy, a theme as specific to Britain’s postwar writers--the male ones--as fatal passion was to Italian opera. It takes place in that well-worn fictional milieu where authors, critics, publishers, broadcasters and assorted intelligentsia talk, drink, fornicate, gossip and watch, for biting purposes, each other’s backs.

Richard Tull, the narrator, is the author of two mildly praised avant-garde novels, followed by four unpublished ones of which the last, titled “Untitled,” is so painfully dense that by Page 10 or 11, any agent or editor who reads it comes down with migraine, double vision or worse. He earns a grubby living reviewing books and editing for a vanity press that takes on such projects as a dissertation claiming that the Nazi concentration camps were run by Jews.

He shares household and child-minding chores with his wife, Gina, who threatens to work full time--thus making him a full-time househusband--if he can’t get his books to sell. Gina is admirable--or so it seems--and he lusts after her, but he is, of course, impotent.

Tull is burnt-out and obsessed. His buddy, Gwyn Barry, who had long been even more of a failure--worse manuscripts, grubbier hack jobs, uglier women--has suddenly become a literary celebrity, fabulously praised, richly rewarded, in demand all over the world, married to a beautiful earl’s daughter, desired by other beautiful women, constantly interviewed. Tull let out an unearthly howl when Barry’s utopian New Age novel, “Amelior,” first crept into the bestseller list; a devoted father, he hit one of his two sons. Now he lives to destroy the other man.

He thinks up schemes to prejudice the judges of a forthcoming literary prize that Barry is slated to win. He makes a feeble attempt to seduce his wife. He sends a depraved, AIDS-infected teen-age female punk to work on him. He researches feverishly a tell-all newspaper profile that will damn him. He engages in an elaborate scheme to make it appear that “Amelior” has been plagiarized. He negotiates with a degenerate drug-dealer who specializes in maiming and “frightenings” to disable him.

At the same time, he keeps Barry constant company (in his role of devoted old friend); takes every opportunity to put him down verbally (honest old friend); beats him regularly at tennis, pool and chess. He accompanies him on an author’s tour of the United States. He nurtures, cherishes, warms his rage and prospective revenge. Since he is such an evident loser all along, it gives nothing away to say that here too, he loses.

“The Information” has its bright spots; mainly in the verbal energy and inventiveness with which Amis, through Tull, discharges upon his day and age. For much of the time, though, the inventiveness goes out. A whole section devoted to the U.S. tour is a tired rehash of what a great many satirical English writers--including Amis Sr. and Martin himself, in “Money”--have previously served up.

Tull’s plotting is active but lifeless. None of the schemes is advanced or developed with any real conviction. It is not that we need necessarily to believe in a story of this kind, but the story has to believe itself. Far-fetched can be a fictional virtue, but we expect someone to do the fetching. Amis will take up a character or situation and then lose interest. The sadistic drug dealer, set up to be an effetely chilling figure, soon turns tepid. Gina, who shows signs of standing for some kind of human reality in the face of Tull’s obsessions, is let to fall apart. Barry’s wife, Demeter, has a faint starting mystery to her that goes flat.

Barry is a relentless caricature, a writer whose image has been created by publicity and is nothing but image. Battling this cartoon, Tull becomes little more than his own obsession. As most of the others do, he declines from being a character to being the author’s remarks. Like an artist who possesses only crayon stubs, Amis quickly colors them down, and his book turns largely into his own fingerprints.