The Revolution Will for Damn Sure Be Televised : Novelist Tom Grimes foresees an apocalypse that raises ratings and makes money : CITY OF GOD, <i> By Tom Grimes (W.W. Norton: $23; 320 pp.)</i>

The following prediction was famously though erroneously attributed to Abraham Lincoln: “I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. Corporations [will be] enthroned, an era of corruption will follow and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people, until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the republic is destroyed.”

In “City of God,” Tom Grimes has written a novel about the moment when greed has once and for all destroyed the republic. Even if you believe, as some people I know do, that we have already passed that moment, “City of God” will provoke not despair but your natural and deepest instincts for change, for meaning and for decency.

Grimes has set his story in a nameless metropolis in the not-too-distant future. Five characters dominate the narrative: Ray, a young black man who murders two white policemen after he hears a rap tape exhorting revolution; Darren, a young black friend of Ray’s; McKuen, a middle-aged black police detective who is the novel’s moral center; Nick, an unprincipled white public defender and all-around yuppie scum, and Julia, a white woman in her 30s who works in the city’s hate crimes department and who finds love with McKuen.

After Ray shoots the policemen, the entire country explodes in riots. A couple of characters suggest that the nation’s money powers have orchestrated the riots as a way of making mass arrests of “undesirables”; other characters seem to believe that ultimately the rioting has no meaning. In any case, the government is well prepared, and immediately declares curfews and mobilizes troops. Mass detentions take place; Armageddon looms.

Nick tries to escape his hated job and the meaningless life he has crafted for himself by capitalizing on the riots. He calls up Gates Remington, the ultra-rich head of an entertainment empire that specializes in gore, sensationalism and sex, and makes a deal to apprehend the murderer on camera. The arrest will be aired on XXN, apparently the only television network left, since every other station is owned or controlled by XXN.

Nick kidnaps Darren, thinking Darren can lead him to Ray. “When the end is near, who needs due process?” Nick asks Darren. McKuen and Julia give chase, McKuen hoping to help Darren.

Ray and Nick propel the action forward, while McKuen and Julia mostly react to what the other two have wrought. Unfortunately, this makes Ray and Nick more interesting than McKuen and Julia. The goodness and morality of McKuen and Julia are never tested, and the reader never knows how deep their goodness is, nor how deep their despair over the state of the world.

Grimes refers frequently to the super-network XXN. Many chapters begin with references to XXN; characters are often overhearing snippets like “This is XXN . . . “ from someone’s television, or imagining themselves live on XXN, in full close-up. Still, XXN never takes on a dynamic presence. It is a ubiquitous entity, but the way a sidewalk is ubiquitous, not the way evil or power can be ubiquitous.

In “City of God,” the feared apocalypse turns into an entertainment spectacle that raises ratings and makes Remington even richer than he already is. Ray himself realizes he has killed in vain, that his crime is “merely another spectacle in the city’s ongoing series of spectacles. . . . [He] isn’t a hero, he’s lost.” This is not a book about revolution: Either revolution is larger than spectacle, or it is not revolution. This is a book about the money powers.

At the end of “City of God,” the characters in various ways start to overcome meaninglessness--or they literally die trying. Of course, their real enemy is not meaninglessness but the money powers--people like Gates Remington, and whoever has prepared for mass detentions, whoever is so eager to lock up millions of citizens. That is who holds the power, and that is the enemy. But because none of the main characters confronts this enemy, and because Nick and Ray never confront each other--even to realize that they’re both pawns--the novel ends on a static note.

Reviewing has become so dependent on hyperbole that words like brilliant and powerful and galvanizing have lost much of their meaning. Against all this false praise, one hates to criticize as talented a writer as Grimes too sharply. Despite its flaws, “City of God” is a fine novel--and a provocative one--about a moment in history we will all need to confront, perhaps sooner than we think.