Chin Music by James McManus (Crown: $14.95; 199 pp.)

Dali a while with James McManus--the most exuberant, indecipherable, imaginative, poetic (undisciplined?) writer since Joyce--and see how he grabs you.

By the lapels, surely. More likely, somewhere considerably south. Quite possibly, too, McManus’ wild swings will miss you completely, leaving you gasping in the breeze.

“Chin Music” is, indeed, surreal. A good deal of the prose is recognizable on its own terms (an eyeball here, a melting watch there). It’s the meaning that’s often elusive--perhaps fittingly so, in the context.

The book is a “premortem tableau” of Chicago, shortly before the Big Bomb hits.

Chicago knows it’s going to get hit. ICBMs are working their way across the United States, their dispatchers already incinerated (“The dead are now killing the living”). Chicago prepares by looting, shooting, groping, orgying, with the volume turned up to unbearable.

Stand-in for humanity is a wife, searching through the frenzy for husband and/or son. The husband, a big-league pitcher, emerges from a hospital to search for home, his brain pulped a week previous by an errant fastball. The son--exemplar of the resilience and oblivion of youth--searches only for Maggie, his latest squeeze.

Around them, chaos, most of it manic. Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.

It’s contagious: an author with a tenuous hold on control, caught in the dissonant rhythm of his creation. Trying, as is everyone in “Chin Music,” to get it in, all of it, before the holocaust. Impossible, of course. But he tries. Lord, does he try! Don’t stop to decipher. The Bomb’s on the way.

Chapters can be as short as a page, or two or three: exquisite agony, peccable imagery. Or they can fulminate for 27 pages (including a spread of mordant men’s room graffiti) limning the passage of amnesiac husband through a strip joint. (Each sentence in the chapter is numbered, 360 of them, though “sentence” is a euphemism: Between three and four is the symbol for pi. No. 131: “So there.” No. 257: “Jamestown, Lefty. Jimi the H, posthep griot and wah-wah chronicler of sundry liminoid phenomena . . . “ No. 119: (A drawing of a clothespin). No. 284: “Syntonic comma.”

McManus hauls it all out, and then some: alliteration, solecism, slapstick, pornography, epigram, non sequitur, cacophony, compassion.

In the end, perhaps that will be the way it is in the end.

Don’t ask Chicago.

Gone fission.