ANOTHER CITY, NOT MY OWN: A Novel in the Form of a Memoir.<i> By Dominick Dunne</i> .<i> Crown: 360 pp., $25</i>

In “Wayward Puritans,” sociologist Kai T. Erikson, citing Emile Durkheim’s “The Division of Labor in Society,” suggests that “crime . . . may actually perform a needed service to society by drawing people together in a common posture of anger and indignation.” Erikson goes on to say that “people who live together in communities cannot relate to one another in any coherent way or even acquire a sense of their own stature as group members unless they learn something about the boundaries of the territory they occupy in social space. . . .”

Dominick Dunne’s “Another City, Not My Own,” which might be described as a screed in the guise of a memoir advertised as a novel, illustrates these ideas to the virtual exclusion of any others. Despite the title’s shrugging demur, Dunne’s book is designed, precisely, to stake a proprietary claim on the city in question--not all of Los Angeles, with its jumbled demographics, but the city of Beverly Hills--by incarnating its moral aporias: He will be its voice of Christian witness in the slough of despond, flog its miscreants and succor their victims and draw the community together in a common posture of anger and indignation.

Indignation is Dunne’s forte. As a trial reporter for Vanity Fair, Dunne has for years purveyed the same demagogic “common sense” that talk TV impresarios share with their highly flammable viewers when pondering repellent concepts such as defendants’ rights, innocent-until-proven-guilty and other constitutional protections that extend (what better proof of our justice system’s evil?) to the culpable and the blameless alike. As the parent of a murdered child, Dunne has come to imagine himself an infallible expert on the dimensions of other people’s guilt, whoever they may be and however complex their motivations might appear to more fallible minds. Various merchants of twaddle have ratified this delusion; Dunne has made a fortune off the cable chitchat circuit, where he can be found most any evening, nattering through his dentures about O.J. Simpson minutiae.

In “Another City, Not My Own,” Dunne carries his loathing of Simpson into surrealistic realms. If the freed O.J. quite sensibly disguises himself to dine in a restaurant and take in a movie, Dunne, in tones worthy of Cotton Mather, wants to know what kind of man puts on a disguise to eat in a restaurant. If the film is “Showgirls,” the question becomes, what kind of man just acquitted on a murder charge goes to see “Showgirls”? Such questions invite us to infer Dunne’s nobility from the fact of O.J.’s supposed depravity. Dunne takes it for granted that Simpson is mocking all decency, even taunting Dunne personally, by showing his disguised face in public, or for that matter by continuing to live. Worse, Dunne offers the “Showgirls” story (evidently apocryphal) as proof that all Simpson ever thinks about are white women with big breasts.

Dunne’s continual derision of Simpson has something wildly distasteful about it, a disproportion one can easily separate from the issue of whether he was guilty. This may be related to the actual community that Dunne’s anger and indignation are intended to define and the stature Dunne awards himself in it. On one hand, we have the Hollywood royalty with whom Dunne spends his evenings, socialites and movie stars who live in unimaginable opulence and receive Dunne’s reports over dessert as if hearing delicious news from a distant planet; then there are the little people, thrust into the limelight by their proximity to the Goldman and Brown murders--some of whom, by virtue of believing Simpson guilty, can be socially assimilated, at least for the duration of their celebrity, into the other more exalted realm with Dunne as the liaison.

Dunne declares the Simpson trial “the Dreyfus case of our time,” but fails to remember that the Dreyfus case was about the anti-Semitic persecution of an innocent man whom enlightened people sought to exonerate. A rather different quality of interest obtains among Dunne’s intimates, who chortle and gloat over each piece of damning evidence and swap rumors about O.J.’s sex life, falling silent whenever a black person enters the room. Though Dunne boldly vows never to forget Ron and Nicole, precious little is said about either, except as salacious or homiletic asides.

The glaringly obvious thing about the Simpson trial is that it provided a large number of mediocrities and gargoyles a two-year shot at national attention; Dunne has located his natural constituency in this bilaterally repulsive affair among those who believe Simpson guilty. He finds much to admire about a vapid opportunist like Faye Resnick and worlds of depth in Nicole Brown Simpson’s parasitic siblings but not an iota of interiority for his book’s villain. Not for him the tortuous psychology of Dostoevsky or Dreiser, who clearly failed to understand that a murderer is a murderer, period, and what you do with a murderer is lock him up and throw away the key and that’s that. In the bad old days, novels tried to imaginatively understand the worlds they were set in; some even went so far as to speculate that a killer could be someone very much like you and me on the worst night of his or her life. But those were the bad old days of complexity, before word processing.

Dunne “novelizes” his Vanity Fair ruminations and their outtakes in this book by changing his name to Gus Bailey. He likewise changes the names of his children, his ex-wife, his brother and his sister-in-law. Otherwise, “Another City, Not My Own” is a documentary collage of Dunne’s actual phone calls, courthouse banter, hotel garage repartee, restaurant badinage and party talk, a gurgling mess of repetitious and numbingly banal opinions, cement dialogue deployed as exposition (“ ‘Your Majesty,’ said Gus, giving the little bob of the head that is a requirement when meeting royalty. ‘Whenever I see you on television or read about you in the papers, I always remember that wonderful night at the palace where you had several of the journalists who were waiting to get into Baghdad . . . ‘ “ and so forth), awash in proper names, most of them famous, their owners clamoring for “Gus” ’ presence at charity events and dinner parties, where they beg him for saucy dish on the Simpson case. Nothing you haven’t already heard, but “Gus” gushes it with the entranced, oracular fixity that Truman Capote used to display when drawling an especially vicious whopper.

“Gus” immediately bonds with strangers who announce their hatred of O.J. and agree with “Gus” “one hundred percent” about Simpson’s guilt and the disgraceful shenanigans of Simpson’s attorneys. “Gus” shares many a wry moment with tiresome Marcia Clark and dreary Kim Goldman, who think he’s the cat’s whiskers. Movie stars, high-powered producers, Queen Noor al Hussein, Nancy Reagan, Elizabeth Taylor and--inevitably--Princess Diana can’t get enough of “Gus” ’ tart remarks. Even at smallish Beverly Hills dinners thrown by Ray Stark or Betsy Bloomingdale, his hosts implore him to get up and hold forth about the trial. This invitation is one the incontinent “Gus” can never resist, often causing friction between his super-rich chums and their lovable but ignorant-about-O.J. black retainers. (The racial implications of the Simpson case, in Dunne’s little cosmos, are limited to staffing shortages on the Westside following Simpson’s acquittal.)

When he isn’t trampling through the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored, Dunne’s alter ego is busy, Proust-like, meandering down memory lane, recalling the plummy days of Old Hollywood when “Gus,” then a movie producer, threw fabulous parties with his wife, “Peach.” That career went down the tubes, it seems, because of drink, and marital problems and Peach’s MS and then the murder of their daughter. The opportunities for name-dropping here are myriad, and Dunne eschews none of them. (“ ‘Do I know Gore? When I was twenty years old, I met Anais Nin in Gore’s house in Guatemala, and she took me away with her to Acapulco. Top that!’ said Gus.”) Dunne’s intoxication with celebrity amounts to an infectious illness: Court TV’s Dan Abrams practically creams in his boxers when Dunne introduces him to Madonna. “Pretty ritzy, Gus,” teases Marcia Clark early on, admiring Dunne’s social savvy. “You don’t seem intimidated by any of these movie moguls.” Maybe not, but Dunne will twist his narrative into a pretzel rather than leave a name undropped, a famous breech unkissed.

By the middle of the book, in fact, Dunne has scattered around so many big names, from Sinatra to King Hussein, to such puny effect that one begins to suspect an incipient effort of satire, especially since neither “Gus” nor his stellar connections ever utter anything original or amusing but, instead, produce the same leaden cliches babbled repeatedly during the Simpson trial. It’s possible, I suppose, that Dunne’s intention is to paint “Gus” as a Nabokovian sort of obsessed lunatic, patronized by the bored well-to-do because he’ll perform after dinner and save them the price of a mariachi band, but somehow I doubt it. Dunne is earnestly, genuinely besotted by fame and his proximity thereto--so much so that in a final macabre act of social climbing, he has himself killed off by Andrew Cunanan. (The deeper psychiatric significance of this suicide-by-fiction can be found, perhaps, somewhere in the world of Faye Resnick, but it’s pretty carefully dissembled here.)

It’s bewildering at first that Dunne-as-Gus writes off his entire producing career as a failure, alluding to it in the most melancholy, self-pitying terms. As it happens, Dunne produced several interesting films that still enjoy cult status, including “Play It as It Lays,” “Panic in Needle Park,” “The Boys in the Band,” and “Ash Wednesday.” What becomes more apparent with each mawkish reprise of Dunne’s resume, however, is that artistic achievement has little weight with Gus/Dunne. In the high-rolling world he aspires to, where he knows “the kind of people who said, ‘We’ll send our plane’ when they invited him for weekends,” commercial success and a broad undiscriminating audience are much, much better than art. If you have enough fans, it doesn’t matter a toss if your “reportage was rebuked in certain quarters of both the journalistic and the legal professions” or if you write the sort of cheesy novels people skim on airplanes. “Walk down Madison Avenue with me,” Gus challenges his rebukers, “and see for yourself how often I am stopped by total strangers.” It’s an invitation any well-televised face could issue just as easily, from Charles Manson to Imelda Marcos, but a silly way for a writer to measure his worth.