FICTION

CAPTAIN JACK ZODIAC by Michael Kandel (Bantam: $4.50, paperback; 224 pp.). Do you ever think life is just a video game programmed by unfeeling aliens who enjoy watching human beings mess up? If so, then Michael Kandel has got a novel for you.

Hilarious and grim, “Captain Jack Zodiac” envisions a future in which today’s toxic trends--inflation, AIDS, drugs, gridlock, gunplay, garbage strikes, global warming--have reached such extremes that the nuclear war that kicks off the action makes things only marginally worse.

In the midst of all this--including a neighbor who acquires super powers from an antiperspirant and a lawn that turns into a squirming green killer--songwriter Clifford Koussevitzsky yearns for normality, which recedes from him at warp speed. To remarry, he literally has to go to hell and back to placate the ghost of his mother-in-law. To reclaim his children (son Josh is a “space cadet” who buys pills from the neighborhood dealer, Captain Jack Zodiac, to hot-rod in far galaxies; daughter Trish is a “mall zombie,” a transparent wisp haunting shopping centers from Kalamazoo to Katmandu) requires even stranger journeys.

Kandel raises a number of metaphysical issues. Like Woody Allen, he wonders whether there’s sex after death, and goes Allen one further: Are there Taco Bells? He explores the idea of serial afterlives: Can you keep on dying into deeper and darker versions of eternity? When the fun has evaporated, though, we’re left with a chilling vision of where the real world is going, along with a testimonial to humans’ thick-headed, admirable, creepy, touching ability to adapt to almost anything even as they furiously resist change.