ANOTHER ROADSIDE ATTRACTION

If the names of all the rock groups and rock albums in the world were laid end to end the result would resemble this novel, about a group of Merrie Metaphysical Pranksters turned toward the Source and inspired by the Infinite Goof. There's Marx Marvelous, the narrator in nom de plumage, dropped out of think tank work at the East River Institute but ambivalent about alternatives; Plucky Purcell, late of crime and the military, who falls in with the R.C. assassin brothers of the Wildcat Creek Monastery, Society of the Felicitators; John Paul Ziller, magician, musician, sculptor, in jockey shorts made from tree frog skins; his red-assed baboon, Mon Cul, the only creature on earth who knows an English word to rhyme with "orange"; and Amanda, gypsy-lepidopterist-philosopher-love goddess. Together they hunt mushrooms, rap, run the Capt. Kendrick Memorial Hot Dog Stand and Wildlife Preserve (garter snakes, a dead tsetse fly and a flea circus) and officiate at the Second Coming of Christ, a corpse abducted from the Vatican. All the stuff of consciousness III, except the consciousness: traveler pass by.