BOOK REVIEW : Mad Descent Into Kids’ Apocalypse : OPERATION WANDERING SOUL <i> by Richard Powers</i> , Morrow $23, 356 pages

Richard Powers, walking encyclopedia, bleeding heart, Doomsday crier--and one of our most talented young novelists--has set his latest tale of apocalypse right here in “Angel City.” Civilization’s crumbling edge is the pediatric ward of a county hospital, where dying children and those who care for them are in desperate search of a healing fiction, a new myth to make sense of senseless tragedy.

Overworked into an hallucinatory stupor, surgery resident Richard Kraft slices and stitches up victims of gang warfare, child abuse, accident, disease. To feel empathy for any of his patients, he fears, is to lose his ability to function. This frustrates his would-be lover, therapist Linda Espera, who believes that only empathy can begin to treat the common wound that underlies each child’s symptoms.

Even Kraft’s defenses buckle before Joy Stepaneevong, a 12-year-old Laotian girl. Frail and exquisitely polite, she has survived massacre, refugee camps and starvation at sea to become an honor student--only to be stricken by bone cancer. She hauntingly resembles a girl whom a teen-age Kraft had seen blown apart by a mine in Thailand, where his father was stationed with the CIA. Joy lost her home because of one of America’s secret wars; now all Kraft’s bloody scalpel work may fail to save her.

Other singular children turn up in the ward: a boy born with no face, a 10-year-old wasted by a rare disease into a little old man of 60. They are drawn by Espera’s warmth--though this proves to be a cover-up for her own childhood wounds--and by the stories she reads to them after hours.

“Peter Pan.” “The Pied Piper.” The Children’s Crusade. The evacuation of children from London during the Blitz. Myths from a dozen cultures, rife with parents killing and eating their children. Tales that share the theme of “children adrift, out of doors too late at night, too far from home, migrating, campaigning, colonizing, displaced, dispersed, tortured loose, running for their lives.”

To read a Richard Powers novel is to be dazzled by the author’s intelligence and made to feel that maybe ignorance is bliss; to be beguiled by a decency that only intensifies the horrors he describes. The plot is Bambi versus Godzilla every time; only the alias of the monster changes.

In “Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance,” it was World War I. In “The Gold Bug Variations,” it was scientific discovery that seemed to reduce human love and values to a genetic twitch. In “Operation Wandering Soul,” it’s the threat of sliding into Third World chaos and poverty. America reacts to it with denial and--since, in Powers’ view, children have always been Third Worlders, bullied, enslaved, sacrificed to adults’ interests--with various forms of child murder.

Powers has much evidence on his side. In Brazil, off-duty police shoot street kids with the blessing of the business community; in L.A., a similar solution hovers, just unspoken, at the end of every letter to the editor urging that we finally do something about crime. We prolong our fading prosperity by ravaging the environment, running deficits, “mortgaging the unborn.”

Yet this apocalypse, unlike the others, is still in progress, still debatable. The hospital sections of the novel are padded with social commentary that is supposed to reflect Kraft’s mental overload but is really Powers straining to convince us. The love affair is pushed aside. The kids are unreal, precisely because they’re all so gifted.

It’s in the flashback to Thailand, and in retelling the classic stories, that Powers excels. His multilayered, frantically allusive prose loosens and flows. Numbing overkill gives way to a poignant vision of the world’s children probing the age-old granite of hopelessness for the mountain crack where the Pied Piper’s followers disappeared--perhaps into yet another prison, but just imaginably into “a republic of staggering rightness . . . that rapture that recourseless minors are told to wait for in all bedtime tales.”