THE COMMONEST of misconceptions about Arthur Hailey's books is that if not great literature, they must at least be superbly crafted--taut, gripping, smoothly written, and so forth. The fact is that's simply not it at all. Hailey's books are rather clumsily put together, all in exactly the same way, and while he could never be accused of overwriting his sentences are still graceless, his dialogue wooden, his characters two-dimensional. And his latest book, The Moneychangers, which came out in paperback last month, is a great deal like all his other books. It is about an American institution (banking); it is selling like hotcakes (number one on the bestseller lists); it is the product of what appears to be quite a considerable amount of research; and it takes a lot of disparate characters and subplots and by the end has them all bound up with one another.

To understand Hailey, who is arguably the most popular writer of fiction in America today, it is best to shed any ideas of him as an artist who is making a creative progression from work to work. Rather, he is a writer who has hit upon a formula that has several great advantages and can be infinitely repeated. (I'm pulling for him to write his next opus about the government bureaucracy, to be entitled State, but I can also see universities, law firms, daily newspapers, the motion picture industry and shipping companies as fertile territory).

The Moneychangers is specifically about the First Mercantile American Bank, (vaguely reminiscent of the Bank of America), in a midwestern city (vaguely reminiscent of Chicago), and a huge struggle for power there. In the opening scene the bank's president announces to its board that he is dying, and for 500 pages First Mercantile's two highest-ranking vice presidents have at it for the top spot. One of the rivers, Alex Vandervoort, a Harvard-educated nonconformist, is the good guy, and the other, Roscoe Heyward, a neurotic First Mercantile lifer, is the bad guy. Up until about page 275 Roscoe appears to have it sewed up, but then the tide begins to turn and by the end he has botched things so badly that he is forced to jump off the Headquarters Tower and leave Alex in triumphant, if dignified control.

Along the way various other things happen: a junior branch officer steals some money; a go-go conglomerate rises and fails; people fall in and out of love; and there is a run of depositers on the bank. All these things are tied together in ways that are too complicated to explain, but it will suffice to say that the novel begins diffusely and then comes together in a manner that is contrived but nagging, insistent.

AT THE SAME time The Moneychangers is meant to be thoroughly realistic. Hailey writes as if he knows a great deal about the way banks work, how mafiosi behave, and what life is like in the slums ("with survival a daily challenge and with crime--petty and otherwise--a surrounding norm"), among other things. Whole scenes and chunks of dialogue have obviously been put in solely because Hailey, the restless chronicler, wanted to illuminate some little-known aspect of banking. His approach is microcosmic--dealing with banks by writing about one bank, with bankers by creating two of them--but that seems to have been, for him, the most painless and exciting way of getting across the information. Besides simple storytelling, his higher purpose is clearly to educate.

Hailey tries valiantly to be topical. He astutely guessed that banks would get a lot of public attention this year, and he has been careful to include things like urban renewal, corporate bribery and women's liberation. The sum total of all this, and the source of much of Hailey's power, is an impression that this is American life as it is lived right now, in the highest and most glamorous and least known strata of power. The air of veracity that pervades his novels must have a lot to do with why they are so popular.

A real banker would probably laugh at The Moneychangers, just as would a doctor at Hailey's The Final Diagnosis, an auto worker at Wheels, or a pilot at Airport. Everything is close enough to believability to satisfy the uninitiated, and sensationalized enough, no doubt, to outrage real experts. It's doubtful that all bankers have "disciplined, steely" minds, as Hailey's do, or that single executives actually live in apartments with shaggy rugs and modern furniture and fireplaces and spectacular views of the city below, or that presidents or corporations are all egomaniacs who own private jets. These exaggerations fall, however, within the general range of what seems likely, and for Hailey's purposes that is enough.

Hailey is not writing, after all, for people intimately familiar with the things he writes about. He avoids the sedate middle-class life of most of his readers and concentrates on the pinnacles of power and the depths of poverty and degradation, where only a rough correlation with reality is needed. In fact Hailey's portrayal of top-echelon business, his main concern in The Moneychangers, feels a little wrong throughout; the carpets are a little too thick, the talk a little too glib, the board members a little too nakedly opportunistic.

For all his fascination with it, Hailey himself is an outsider to the world he writes about--he was born in England and is a Canadian citizen--and understandably he does not have a perfect grasp of the social relations of the American ruling class. Making Roscoe Heyward a Boston Brahmin, an aristocrat, with an only son who is a certified public accountant, may seem to Harvard sensibilities to be ever so slightly off, but it is the kind of minor point that doesn't mean a great deal. Though life in general and Hailey's obsession, class, in particular, are infinitely subtle, Hailey need not portray them that way.

UNDERNEATH THIS aura of impressive, slightly clumsy knowledgeability about banks and bankers, the Moneychangers is quite a simple moral tale. Its characters are for the most part either good or bad, so it is easy to tell, by observing what they do and think, where Hailey's sympathies lie--and if these associations alone don't sketch out an ideology, the action of the novel certainly does. Alex Vandervoort, the hero, is liberal; he lives with an intelligent woman lawyer, tries to have the bank help people in the ghetto, and is scrupulously honest. The villain, Roscoe Heyward, fluctuates wildly between extremes; he is either snooty or obsequious, asexual or consumed by satyriasis, teetotaling or drunk. He is basically conservative, and in favor of directing the bank more toward high finance and less toward small depositers, but he is also obsessively ambitious (something Alex is not (and pragmatic enough to desert any first principles that might be holding him back.

There are several messages in all this. Any gulf between stated morality and actual behavior is bad. Extramarital sex is bad, although marriage need not be a prerequisite for meaningful sex. The old-boy network is bad and restricting. Upward mobility is good. Banks can help poor people and be good, and they can help corporations and be bad. While money is not a bad thing, the singleminded pursuit of it is. Sensible and liberal reform of society through legal means and existing institutions is good. Anything illegal is bad.

Hailey is presenting a deeply reassuring view of what seem to be the bewildering and often destructive workings of American high finance. He writes in the tradition of Horatio Alger and Andrew Carnegie, saying that yes, American business can be explained in straight talk that anyone can understand and yes, it is glamorous and exciting up there at the top, and no, banks and big business are necessarily neither unresponsive and exploitative nor in the control of a closed hereditary elite. Arthur Hailey is, these days, the great American novelist because he tells us what we want to hear.