Children of a Laser God : AURORA 7 <i> By Thomas Mallon (Ticknor & Fields: $18.95; 238 pp.) </i>

On May 24, 1962, 11-year-old Gregory Noonan leaves his fourth-grade classroom and takes the railroad to Manhattan in order to join the crowd in Grand Central Station watching Scott Carpenter’s Aurora 7 space flight on the huge monitors. The boy is space-mad, loony for the Mercury project, a would-be moon traveler. Shy, smart and uncommunicative (he already has trouble receiving kisses or saying “I love you” to close relatives), Gregory has veered out of the orbit of his understanding parents; he seems to have received an otherworldly call to outer space.

With audacious cunning, Thomas Mallon implies that God Himself has lured Gregory away from his home and into darkest Manhattan, much as He has lured Scott Carpenter into the heavens. What’s more, God has been planning this strategy for several weeks, with noticeably dark intentions.

“Aurora 7” is a book, then, that risks interpreting the heavenly design for a single day, revealing bits and pieces of the divine plan. Mallon even gives the reader the opportunity to try omniscience and omnipotence on for size. “What would it feel like to be God?” is a question the book answers obliquely, as Mallon builds a model community controlled by a sometimes moody Almighty, a clockwork laboratory.

James Joyce said that the artist should be like a god, up above the world, paring his fingernails. Mallon seats the reader next to that lofty throne, giving a bird’s-eye view of life in early-’60ss suburbia.

Melwyn Park, where the Noonans live, is a pastel-colored place where “pale yellow metal cupboards” have “boomerang handles,” where the mother, Mary Noonan, listens to an “aqua colored Admiral radio” in her kitchen, which boasts a “sunburst clock with its satellite numbers.” A world of Futura and kitsch, lovingly recreated.

Mallon constructs the Thursday, May 24, of the Aurora 7 launch out of transcripts of CBS’ flight coverage (featuring a very worried Walter Cronkite) and running excerpts from the Air-Ground Communication NASA log. There are brightly colored bits of Life Magazine, and New York Times “think pieces” about the need for wives who bolster their husbands, thereby avoiding the dreaded problem of passive sons (“Mary knew what he was talking about . . . “). All this punctuated with perky Irving Berlin lyrics insistently announcing “It’s A Lovely Day Today.”

Melwyn, N.Y., is just a speck on the cosmic ocean, so Mallon also enters into the minds of historical and fictional characters: into the mind of John F. Kennedy, who wonders what he will do when he finishes being President; into the mind of Lee Harvey Oswald, who on this very day is in the Soviet Union applying for re-entry into the United States. Women who are unwittingly taking Thalidomide during pregnancy are met, along with a cast including a singled-out taxi driver, a confused priest and an acerbic female novelist. A peep backwards at May 24, 1862, offers the sight of another 11-year-old, yearning to sneak off and join the Confederate Army as a drummer boy.

Eerily, the future is revealed. We are told that Gregory’s dad, Jim, will die of cancer; that the fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Linley, will get divorced and go to law school. Stray bits, effluvia, are recorded in the heavenly archive:

“Twenty-five years from tonight, at the Crown Space Center of the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, Charles Williams, custodian, will finish vacuuming the last gallery on his rounds. He will miss a green M&M;, dropped by an 11-year-old boy who was in the gallery with his parents, between 3:30 and 4:00. After Williams shuts the lights, it will lie until morning, still and undisturbed, near the heavy pedestal on which rests the Aurora 7.”

There is Providence in the fall of a sparrow, of course, but this is the first book I know of to keep track of missing M&M;’s.

In fact, the stylistic forerunner of this kind of model-railroad clockwork style is the “Wandering Rocks” section of Joyce’s “Ulysses,” another Catholic book. But Joyce makes the mechanical contraption one brilliant chapter of a work whose intentions are richer, vaster.

Unlike Joyce, Thomas Mallon has written a book that is compassionate, but which makes no real imaginative investment in its characters. As a result, the suffering the book depicts in the course of its tour through time and space seems foreshortened and somewhat facetious--as if the punishments of a whimsical God were somehow less real, or less felt, and as if the human victims of these punishments were really toys.

While this may be “Aurora 7’s”s Catholic vision (the catechism is quoted, and a good deal of Catholic imagery is invoked), it is also, oddly, the vision behind Thomas Mallon’s earlier study, “A Book of One’s Own,” a brilliant panoptic survey of people’s published diaries. Here, too, Mallon provides a far-reaching overview--he has read widely and well; he writes wittily. But, again, his taste is for the stoic. He disapproves of self-absorption, with the result that as a writer Mallon seems more urbane than poetic.

This facetiousness mars an original work by a promising novelist and literary critic. Although the book closes with an ambiguous tribute to God’s mercy, “Aurora 7” is more of an anomaly, a tender but chilly novel which asks the Eternal One a rather peculiar but familiar question: “Where were You in ‘62?”