BOOKS

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

SIGN OFF by Jon Katz

Bantam; 374 pages; $18.95

Most books set in the TV-news industry are about the drama of a big story, the intrigue of an unfolding scandal or the power and glamour and sheer money associated with being a big-league anchor, interviewer or producer. In fiction and reality, TV executives often characterize themselves the way characters do in Jon Katz's roman a clef: as ranking among "the 25,000 most successful people in the world," right up there with generals, Senators, tycoons and Third World dictators. But here the big story and intrigue are inside TV itself -- the takeover of a network very much like CBS, where Katz was executive producer of the Morning News from 1983 to 1985. The corporate raider is compounded in equal measure of Donald Trump, CBS chief executive Laurence Tisch and a handful of other hardball players from the headlines. Katz's hero is a work-obsessed producer who undergoes a classic mid-life crisis in which he questions the value of ambition, propositions a female colleague, visits a prostitute, loses his job and realizes that there is more to life.

Much of the plot revisits territory from the stage hit Other People's Money, the movie Wall Street and a shelf of recent nonfiction, not to mention such Eisenhower-era cautionary tales as The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Katz's prose is competent, his dialogue serviceable and his cast of characters large and mostly faceless (although its obsessives stand out: a shopworn survivor of the executive-suite wars; a by-hook-or-by-crook booker of talk-show interviewees; and a tough, moralistic accountant).

Three qualities elevate the book to the memorable. First, Katz knows TV, not just the details that lend verisimilitude but the mind-set and values. Any seasoned journalist is likely to identify with some incident and feel a twinge of shame. Second, rather than fulminate against barbarian interlopers, Katz is candid about the waste, carelessness and openly tolerated thievery that made their raids possible. The TV business, he says, was not businesslike. Third, Katz does not exploit the melodrama of the takeover. He largely ignores the boardroom fighting and has the actual bloodless coup take place off-page. His real subject is what work means, whether to a honcho or to a coffee-cart handler -- how a job becomes an identity, so that losing it forces a person not only to plan a future but also to re-evaluate the past. Job cuts are a standard TV-news topic. Katz proves that fiction can be far more evocative in making this loss of personhood really matter to the rest of us.