OPERATION REMISSION

Resurrection and elegy for the roust-'em-outta-their-beds antics of the antiwar hippies of the Sixties, designed as a thought-rousing, adult suspenser. Leading the pack is Gilbert Townsend, a magnetic, hip-talking scamp on the order of Dean Moriarty, nimble master of the hot-wired car and disguise artist with a genius for fading into daylight. With a mythic grasp of the back roads of America, ever-moving Gil is the Gingerbread Man whose ya-ya-ya-ya-can't-catch-me has kept him ahead of "the govs" since the Movement died. Now he's come into a dreamboat of a plan—the biggest antiwar ploy ever—that will also make him a multimillionaire. Starring for him in the role of patsy is Wendell "Jake" Jacobsen, a former war resister now dying of leukemia engendered by Army service on Yucca Flats during the earliest days of atomic testing. Jake thinks his nine-year-old Miriam also died of his irradiated genes. What's more, Jake's big love, Nora Sherman, a violist living in D.C., is also a cancer victim, though on crutches and still playing. Object of the ploy: finally to make clear to Congress, and all governments, the world- killing, cancerous catastrophe already present in the mishandling, spread, and unaccounted-for loss of nuclear materials. How? By exposing every member of Congress to low-level radiation during the President's State of the Union Address in the House of Representatives, via a dose of Plutonium 239 whiffed into the chamber by way of the ventilators—a kind of Jake's Last Stand. To make all this convincing, Johnson spells out the innards of the House to a fare-thee-well as the reader crawls through shafts unseen and dust unbreathed since 1860. A slow start builds to a rich mix of character and plot—and a big jump upward for second-novelist Johnson (Killing the Blues, 1987).