No Escape From Nuclear, Personal Fates : MERIDIAN 144, <i> by Meg Files,</i> Soho Press, $19.95, 264 pages

Kit Manning is an American Everywoman. She lives in the Midwest; her father is an invisible kind of guy. Her sister, Judy, is the “cold fish” of the family, and that’s because Kit’s mother is fat, a chatterbox, and desperately eager to please. Kit is--or is going to be--the “bad girl.” It’s her way of rebelling against the shameful neediness of her doomed mother.

So, quickly, Kit sleeps with a dozen or so guys, marries a morose man named Daniel, begins fooling around again, compulsively and sadly. She gets “caught,” and Daniel moves away to Alaska.

Faced with the death of her mother, as well as this speedy desertion by her husband, Kit applies (and is accepted) for a teaching position in far-away Micronesia, on a pinprick of an island called Tano, close to Yap and Truk and the Marianna Trench.

She finds a new boyfriend, resumes her hobby of skin diving, and--very luckily--is underwater when a nuclear holocaust presents itself and the world as we know it ends. The sky and water turn yellow; her dive partner and sometime lover writes “fireball” and then “shock wave” on his diving slate. Then he dies. Kit emerges alone, into a singed and blackened hellhole that used to be a Paradise--at least for some people.

Kit has been a junior high school teacher, following in the footsteps of her mother, so one of the very few people she is to meet in the next few weeks is Rogelio, a Filipino kid who has been teased mercilessly by Micronesian children. Kit also sees cryptic signs written by the mysterious “Jesse S,” who tells this dead world that he is still alive. She goes to the quarantine center on the island where her dog has been moping for a couple of months, and lets her out.

Then there are a couple of other guys: One is Anthony Taitano, one of those men who just won’t learn. Even though the rest of the world has just gone up in smoke. Taitano persists in wandering the island, forcing unwilling women and children to have sex with him. Taitano has a bad personality.

More personable on the surface, but at least as loony, is Samuel Flood, a man who knew the holocaust was coming and picked this island as a place to survive. He has a bristling collection of guns and Spam and hard biscuits. In a way, of course, he is as crazy as a clam convention, but in another way he’s sane, because he--of all the characters here--has been able to look this “end of the world” in the face. He has prepared.

There is a novel from years ago by George Stewart, “Earth Abides,” in which many of these same problems and puzzles are addressed. “Meridian 144” compares to that book because the mechanics of the war, as such, are muted and irrelevant. After everybody’s dead, who cares who started it, or who won it or who lost it? The problem here is far more pressing: Of the six or seven human beings now left alive on this island, who can stand to live with whom?

Out here on the island of Tano, several men shape up and stand forward to become Kit’s friends and/or lovers: the odious Taitano, who would rather rape than play a nice round of golf; the nutty Samuel Flood, who quotes the Bible; a sweet Japanese man who weeps and the badly wounded Jesse, who meets the end of the world head-on with dopey jokes.

This is a fine, sad, interesting novel. And lest anyone think that it’s out of date, Files simply has changed all the Russians to Arabs and Jews, so the end of the world scenario plays out quite nicely. This book won’t change the world, but it will make you think about it. The novel is aces: Courageous, imaginative, nervy, admirable.

Next: John Wilkes reviews “ Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition,” by Merlin Donald (Harvard University Press).