BOOK REVIEW / FICTION : Living in a State of Suspended Adolescence : TECHNICOLOR PULP <i> by Arty Nelson</i> ; Warner $18.95, 204 pages

An inordinate number of first novels by writers under 30 have been published in the past 10 years with some reference on the dust jacket to the author’s ability to speak to, or speak for, their generation.

Lately, the references use words like slacker and twentysomething, lame catch-all terms for kids who came of age sometime in the ‘80s, as if any group of a certain age is that easy to box together. There are, of course, commercial considerations. The people in marketing and publicity need demographics clearly defined, targets easily marked. What do the young people of this country think? And more importantly, how do we get them to spend, spend, spend?

If there were such a thing as a guidebook for young writers working on their first novels, it would have to include a few warnings. Beware the treacherous terrain of plotlessness. Nothing has to happen for your book to be good--plot is not a requirement of good fiction. But something has to compensate for any lack of motion. Clarity of voice and trueness of character do not make up entirely for stasis. Stream-of-consciousness first-person present-tense writing has to end up somewhere. Your world is, of course, most interesting to you, but others must also find something of interest. Or what’s the point? Why not simply keep a diary? Why bother?

Arty Nelson, thankfully, never received a copy of this guidebook and his basically plotless first novel, “Technicolor Pulp,” is a rare testament to the wisdom of ignoring the rules. Told in the voice of its protagonist, Jimi Banks, the book is about drifting and floating and being lost in the world. In a state of suspended adolescence so common among people in their 20s, Jimi is as inarticulate and immature and self-obsessed as Holden Caulfield ever was. Trouble is, he’s 26.

There is nothing happening in these spare 200-odd pages. Jimi, shall we say, has a taste for the sauce, not because there’s some deep, awful pain somewhere inside him, but because it makes him feel good and being drunk can be fun when there’s nothing else to command one’s attention. He has virtually no sense of himself and lunges and grabs at anything that crosses his field of vision, anything that will, for a time at least, cause him to forget the void he inhabits--women, hash, whiskey, hanging out in Europe.

Jimi is a kid from the East Coast, a college graduate (we all know how little comfort that is) whose best friend has just hung himself from a tree. He’s what most would call a loser, a guy with no goals other than those immediately gratifying, no friends save a few people he hung out with in school. He has no job and as a result, no money.

Mooching and borrowing enough of the latter, Jimi gets on a plane to London where he crashes at the flat of a guy named Doobe, a friend he knew in the States. There are lots of nights spent drinking, experiencing an endearing form of culture shock. There is hash, there are girls, there are the painful physical side effects of a few months of drinking much and eating little and losing a connectedness to the world.

But what happens is not important here. What keeps you reading is a voice authentically so unhinged, so pathetic and lonely, so natural and pure and unedited that one hopes Nelson didn’t rely too much on autobiography, as most first novels do.

“Technicolor Pulp,” whether he likes it or not, is going to be referred to as “twentysomething” fiction. This book comes as close as anything yet written to defining the confusion of a group of young Americans all of those people on Madison Avenue want to target.