Books of the Times; A Jungle? It's Murder, It's a Conspiracy

THE JOB

By Douglas Kennedy

387 pages. Hyperion. $23.95.

ULTERIOR MOTIVE

By Daniel Oran

310 pages. Kensington. $22.95.

''Business was good today. I wheeled, I dealed, I schmoozed, I closed.'' Thus speaks Ned Allen at the opening of Douglas Kennedy's harrowing tale of downward mobility, ''The Job.''

Ned is the successful young Northeast regional advertising sales manager for CompuWorld, the third-biggest computer magazine in America.

He meets his quotas. He earns his bonuses. He makes just enough to support the free-spending Manhattan life he lives with his wife, Lizzie, a rising star in a public-relations company.

Everything looks good for Ned and Lizzie when a crisis suddenly looms. A German company buys CompuWorld, promising not to interfere so long as advertising quotas continue to be met. But when one of Ned's salesmen fails to close a major deal, Ned is given the choice of either accepting the loss and losing his job or rescuing the deal and being promoted to publisher. The only catch is that by taking the latter course he is forced to play dirty and double-cross a friend.

As a result, everything blows up in Ned's face. Just as he is about to take his promotion, the company is sold again and CompuWorld is killed. Ned finds himself out of a job and unable to find another because of the enemies he has made. Lizzie leaves him, and he begins a downward spiral so powerfully narrated and dizzying that you find yourself thinking of Arthur Miller's ''Death of a Salesman,'' David Mamet's ''Glengarry Glen Ross'' and Donald Westlake's blackly satirical novel ''The Axe.''

The novel's epigraph, by Kafka, seems apt: ''The true way leads along a tightrope, which is not stretched aloft but just above the ground. It seems more designed to trip one than to be walked upon.'' In fact, so bleak and depressing is Mr. Kennedy's story that you begin to wonder what the point of it all will be. Is the novel a comment on ambition? Or a plea for moral conduct in business? Or a variation on the Book of Job?

As things turn out, Mr. Kennedy appears equally at sea about what he is up to in ''The Job.'' Instead of resolving the bruising issues he has raised, he eventually turns his story into a thriller about a murderous conspiracy that Ned runs afoul of in his endless search for another job. Just as he did in his previous novel, ''The Big Picture,'' Mr. Kennedy loses control of his material and leaves the reader not dazzled or emotionally purged but merely entertained.

This comes as a relief, in a way. By the time Ned sorts everything out you can say that one way or another your attention has been held throughout. But there's a serious novel hiding inside ''The Job,'' and one of these days Mr. Kennedy may well write it all the way through.

In Daniel Oran's first novel, ''Ulterior Motive,'' you encounter a murderous conspiracy in its opening pages. Going home from work in the middle of the night, Jonathan Goodman, a project manager at a giant Seattle-based computer company called Megasoft, realizes that he has left his appointment book somewhere. On the way back to the place he thinks it may be, he takes a shortcut through a parking garage and witnesses the shooting of a man he is able to identify from the name tag on the corpse as Walter Kaminski.

Later, when Jonathan wonders aloud to a colleague why the company's security force is covering up the murder, the colleague comments: ''Jon, don't take this the wrong way or anything, but do you really think you're going to be able to figure that out? I mean, you're no secret agent. You're not some private eye. This isn't TV, with a guaranteed happy ending. You start snooping around some more, and you may end up like that Kaminski guy.''

Unhappily, this little stab of realism doesn't work. ''Ulterior Motive'' may not be ''TV, with a guaranteed happy ending,'' but it's a cliche in practically every other respect. What's behind Kaminski's murder is a plot by the leadership of Megasoft to make a dictatorship of America, and the clues are so obvious that any idiot could figure them out. Even Jonathan eventually catches on, and he's so dim that when Karen Grey, the Seattle reporter for Business World magazine, telephones to ask him about a promotion he received a month earlier, he thinks she's talking about the murder he just witnessed. Of course, the author's point in having Karen call is to get her together with Jonathan to form a detective team. So, as keeps happening over and over in the novel, plausibility is sacrificed to Mr. Oran's heavy hand.

What is intriguing about ''Ulterior Motive'' is its author's background as, first, a collaborator with the behaviorist B. F. Skinner on chimpanzee-language research, and, then, the inventor of the Start Button and Taskbar for the computer program Windows 95. Anyone clever enough to design an important component of a major piece of software ought to be able to plot a suspenseful overthrow of democracy, one would think.

But while you get from ''Ulterior Motive'' a feeling of what working for a company like Megasoft is like, as well as some intriguing speculation on the future of computers, the plot of ''Ulterior Motive'' is feeble. Just imagine the leadership of Megasoft not realizing that files deleted from a hard drive can be retrieved! Is Mr. Oran kidding or just talking down to his readers?

Whatever he's doing, there's less than meets the eye in ''Ulterior Motive.'' Whereas in ''The Job,'' there's more.