Primary Education : PRIMARY COLORS, Anonymous <i> (Random House: $24; 366 pp.)</i>

Reviewers of “Primary Colors” have at least one reason to be thankful to the book’s unidentified author: They won’t need to use up much space familiarizing their readers with the plot. As advertised, this roman a clef is so blatantly an insider’s account of the 1992 Clinton campaign that practically all of its principal characters are instantly recognizable, from doughnut-scarfing, touchy-feely “Gov. Jack Stanton” and his redoubtable (and mostly just touchy) wife, “Susan,” on down. So little has been altered in relation to the actual events of Bill Clinton’s topsy-turvy race for the Democratic nomination that when the fictionalized story does deviate from the familiar version, readers are likely to feel somewhat cheated--in more ways than one.

After all, the smarmy allure of seeing that tantalizing word “Anonymous” on the cover is that it promises unadorned, scandalous veracity. (Obviously, a pseudonym would have protected the author’s identity just as well--but then again, it wouldn’t be nearly as canny a marketing ploy, now, would it?) Those who care to join the Beltway guessing game about who really wrote “Primary Colors” would be well advised to look for someone who’s pretentious as well as unscrupulous, because to grant yourself a novelist’s prerogatives after letting your publisher hype you as a snitch mostly just proves that you can’t even act in bad faith in good faith.

Besides, since the Clinton saga made a riveting soap opera even when CNN was telling it and since we’re now being taken behind the scenes by someone who evidently did witness plenty of the campaign’s messier goings-on in close-up, “Primary Colors” hardly needs any fictional embroidery to qualify as a lurid read. Indeed, given the sales pitch, it’s almost a flaw that the book isn’t unadulterated junk. Unexpectedly, it’s a work of some literary as well as reportorial skill, not to mention some literary as well as meretricious ambition.

The names may be a tip-off to the author’s higher aspirations. Jack Stanton’s moniker cobbles together those of two characters in “All the King’s Men,” Robert Penn Warren’s 1946 novel about Louisiana demagogue Huey Long; and the choice of “Henry” as the narrator’s given name is most likely a nod to Henry Adams, whose similarly indiscreet Washington novel “Democracy” was also published anonymously.

The Henry of “Primary Colors” is a youthful but already seasoned politico, a former staff wallah to the House majority leader--called Larkin here but unmistakably Dick Gephardt, right up to the eyebrows, or rather the distressing lack of them. Having quit that gig, Henry signs on with Stanton’s budding operation. But while Henry’s resume matches that of onetime Gephardt factotum George Stephanopoulos, his skin color doesn’t.

Unlike his real-life counterpart, he’s the child of an interracial marriage, a fillip added mostly for the sake of letting his creator pretend to be up to something loftier than gossip by introducing black-white relations as a theme. Fairly preposterously, Henry’s also been saddled with none other than the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (“the Rev. Harvey Burton”) as a grandfather. Can the author really believe an African American narrator needs a pedigree that grand to account for Henry’s convenient reservations about serving Clinton-/Stanton?

But neither he nor the author lets those qualms get in the way overmuch. Ethics aside, the back-room look at the Clinton campaign is terrifically entertaining--crammed with anecdotal detail and glib cross-talk, astutely observed and often very funny. The “vehement opacity” of James Carville (“Richard Jemmons”) is amusingly captured, as is his alarming physical presence: “We really want the public to see that Jack Stanton has some hillbilly who looks like he was sired during the love scene from ‘Deliverance’ running his campaign,” another advisor snipes at Jemmons during a typically testy conference.

Stanton’s rivals for the nomination are lampooned with deftly accurate, patently knowledgeable malice, from decorated Vietnam vet “Charlie Martin” (“A war hero and he doesn’t have the discipline to do straight on,” Stanton marvels) to gloom merchant “Lawrence Harris,” who’s glimpsed before one debate “carrying a copy of Scientific American with ‘The Promise of Desalinization’ on the cover.” And then, of course, there’s diary-keeping, sententious New York Gov. “Orlando Ozio,” whose see-through pseudonym alone lets us know that we’re off to see the wizard--by way of Disney World.

Gennifer Flowers appears on schedule; here, she’s “Cashmere McLeod,” whose “curled, snarly lips” are memorably described as making her look “as if she had bitten into a lemon while having an orgasm.” But even though virtually every scandal and nasty rumor ever associated with the Clintons resurfaces here in skimpy disguise --there’s even a grim and all-too plausible variant on Vince Foster’s suicide--the portrait of the candidate himself reaches for something deeper than caricature. Clearly, the author does or did admire him enormously, if ambivalently. In some ruminative passages, the tone tellingly veers from hard-boiled scrutiny toward starry-eyed gush: “Money had no magic for him, the folks did. . . . It was more than a knack; it was something deeper, more profound and respectful. . . .”

The irony is that the book’s own low instincts are far surer than its lofty ones. So long as “Primary Colors” sticks to being a dishy, quasi-reportorial campaign chronicle, it’s an eye-opener. But somewhere around midpoint, the author decides to attempt more than that and so, for a third act, the story is skewed to build up to a conventional climax, brimming with derivative musings about Faustian bargains and complicity.

These plot twists no longer tally with the Clinton story as we know it. The sudden drop-off in anecdotal density unmistakably signals that the author has begun to invent rather than record, and while the conclusion isn’t bad, exactly--redoing “All the King’s Men” for liberal boomers has its charm--it all too obviously owes far more to the literary models whose company this author is lobbying to join than to firsthand experience. Ultimately, “Primary Colors” is half a serious novel dressed up as prurient tittle-tattle, and half the other way around--a stew of mixed intentions whose indecisiveness would do credit to Bill Clinton himself.