The Vipers' Club

Though resemblances to The Player abound in this deft, Hollywood-exposing debut, John H. Richardson — a former senior writer at Premiere magazine — has a less subversive perspective than Michael Tolkin. When striving young Peter James leaves film-crit academe to become assistant to Max Fischer, the successful mogul producer of trashy action movies, he soon resents his role as ''a flunky, a peon'' to a man he both despises and emulates. Richardson is almost too skillful rendering Max, whose constant hollering and spewing can give even the reader a headache. But his lucid, canny prose makes The Vipers' Club less a skewering of Hollywood's stereotypical cutthroat, survival-of-the-slimiest mentality than a sometimes disarmingly nuanced explanation of it. B+