About Face.

Face-Time, by Erik Tarloff (Crown, 249 pp., $23)

The Clinton presidency, for all its richness, has not ushered in a golden age of literature. There was Primary Colors, the brisk, eerily truthful novel by Joe Klein. And there was, of course, the Starr report. (Against this administration, fiction hardly has a chance.)

Now there is the novel that has all of Washington society aflutter: Erik Tarloff's Face-Time-which concerns a president's adultery with the help; and his right to it. The book boasts all the desirable blurbs, led by Jim Lehrer and Judy Woodruff (who calls it "the ultimate Washington novel"). Sally Quinn, the Washington-est Washingtonian of them all, has christened Face-Time "the hottest book of the season." And so it is.

Part of the book's success stems from the identity of its author. Tarloff is the husband of Laura Tyson, a former economic advisor to President Clinton-and, not at all incidentally, a hell of a looker. Tarloff himself is a veteran writer for TV, and he has also penned speeches for some of the giants of Democratic podiums: Clinton, Al Gore, Donna Shalala, and Robert Reich. He denies that his book has anything to do with current headlines; but his timing, he grants, is sweet.

Face-Time is, indeed, a novel set in Washington, involving a president, a speechwriter, and so on. It contains lovely D.C. touches, relating to eateries, neighborhoods, and the like. It even illuminates bureaucratic folkways and foibles, a la (and this is high praise) Chris Buckley's White House Mess (1986). But it is not a Washington novel. Not really. It is a novel about adultery. And, in its moral idiocy, it is an alarming, revolting, contemptible work. Perfect for the Clinton era.

Ben, a wordsmith, and Gretchen, a functionary, hook up with the presidential campaign of Charles Sheffield-and each other. "Campaign sex," as everyone knows, is not supposed to count as sex; it is simply a little recreation between comrades out on the trail. But Ben and Gretchen actually fall in love, and a glorious love it is. Tarloff writes beautifully, even movingly, about the subject. He obviously knows a thing or two about romance. And the relationship he creates seems the most wondrous thing in the world.

When Sheffield is elected, our heroes land jobs in the White House. Life is grand. But a problem soon develops (well, two). First, Ben and Gretchen are not married, only living together as though married-which is Tarloff's way of copping out. The arrangement is intended to lend ambiguity to a situation that, for all the author's moral contortions, has none. And second (as Ben the narrator puts it), "Gretchen is f***ing the president. And I don't know what to do about it."

What Ben does not do is tell both The Love of His Life and The Boss of His Life to get bent. It is far more complicated than that, you see-and recall that "complicated" is the favorite word of Bill Clinton's more sophistic defenders. (Much of Face-Time, in fact, reads like a Richard Cohen column; and that includes the wit, intelligence, and high style.) This is the president, after all, and do the ordinary rules apply? How can Gretchen be blamed for taking her shot at a rendezvous with history? Should Ben not feel honored, to be cuckolded by so great a man? And is what Gretchen is doing really so different from what Ben is doing-angling for precious "face-time" with the Principal?

President Sheffield, like Clinton, knows how to "compartmentalize" (a loaded word that Tarloff uses twice). Ben must learn to compartmentalize, too. To complicate (there we go again!) matters, Sheffield is working on a deal that could end carnage in Africa. If Ben made a stink, "perhaps the real victims" would be Africans, some of whose lives might be saved "if Sheffield retained his political predominance." (Shades of Time magazine's Nina Burleigh, who, unforgettably, confessed, "I'd be happy to give [Clinton] a [Lewinsky] just to thank him for keeping abortion legal.")

Ben's objections, he insists, are not moral-oh no. That would be so absolutist, so puritanical, so Republican. (There is only one Republican in the book, and he is straight out of Hollywood central casting: racist, anti-Semitic, crude. There is only one black person, too, and he is a Secret Service agent whom Tarloff makes speak in jarringly inappropriate black English. Whassup widdat, Erik?) No, Ben objects because . . . well, the betrayal hurts so much. And yet, nothing is clear-cut, nothing is so primitive as to be right or wrong, true or false, good or bad. Tarloff gives us pure situational ethics.

At story's end, the First Lady, Hillary-like, whispers to Ben, "We just have to overlook personal lapses. What makes him special is so much more important than any personal lapses." And Ben comes to accept Gretchen's charge that what he really resents is her proximity to the chief executive, not the infidelity.

In a pre-publication interview, Tarloff was asked, point-blank, whether his book was autobiographical. No, he answered. "At no time did I have even a moment's stray suspicion that there was anything romantic or sexual between Laura and President Clinton. The thought never occurred to me" (though you can bet it did to Clinton). And if there had been such an affair, Tarloff added, he would not have written the book- "especially considering that Laura and I have an adolescent son," who would find it "embarrassing."

An amazing, revelatory answer, that: not My wife isn't an adulterer, thank you very much, you SOB, but Well, no, I don't think it happened, and if it had, I'd've had to give up the book.

Such is the nature of Bill Clinton's America. No cause to be judgmental-except about this creepy, horrifying, understandably popular book.