Elegant Hell

By R.Z. Sheppard

KALKI by Gore Vidal

Random House; 254 pages; $10

The Bhagavad-Gita reckons a day in the life of the creator god Brahma as roughly 311 trillion, 40 million years. This twitch in the flank of eternity is divided into a thousand cycles of four ages. The first is golden with virtue, wisdom and religion. Vice is introduced in the second age and the universe goes downhill thereafter. We are, according to the ancient Vedic text, some 5,000, years into Kaliyuga, the final, corrupt age. This cycle should all be over in about 427,000 years.

Gore Vidal cannot wait. His latest novel is an apocalyptical extravaganza that craftily combines feminism, homosexuality, mysticism, science fiction, fiction science, the second law of thermodynamics, the first law of survival, high fashion and low animal cunning. The plot is diabolically clever. Theodora (Teddy) Ottinger, the world's leading female pilot and bisexual author of the bestselling Beyond Motherhood, stumbles into the service of Jim Kelly, a golden-haired Viet Nam vet who fancies himself Kalki, the Hindu god whose job it is to ring down the curtain on the material universe. Teddy needs the money; she is behind in alimony payments to her ex-husband.

Financed by drug profits from Southeast Asia, Kalki/Kelly launches a publicity blitz that includes a spectacular death act in Madison Square Garden. The smashing of an atom is projected as a blinding light show. A Kalki/Kelly double and the horse he rode in on are blown to shreds, an event that tens of millions get to examine in endless TV replays. It is, notes an L.A. viewer, "the biggest thing that's hit the Hollywood Hills since what's-his-name walked on the moon."

The resurrected Kalki's appearance on the tube features the dance of eternity, the ritual that signals the end of the world. It gets a Nielsen rating of 49. It is also the very last picture show. As Kalki concludes his dance, the earth's 4 billion inhabitants drop dead simultaneously. The feat has been accomplished by having Teddy Ottinger unwittingly rain a pattern of 70 million plague-infested paper lotuses throughout the world while flying the cult's private 707 on what she thought was a promotion tour. Only five people are left: Kalki/Kelly, his wife Lakshmi, her obstetrician, Teddy and a female geneticist named Geraldine. All lower animal life is also spared, presumably to rediscover the peaceable kingdom. The survivors discover that treachery and surprises have not ended with Kali-yuga.

The novel's narrator, Teddy Ottinger, records the final months of her species in the White House, where the five "Perfect Masters" have established themselves in an elegant hell: "The logistics of survival in a dead world," she says, "are complex and, thank God, distracting."

If the balance and rhythm of that statement seem characteristic of Vidal at his talk-show best, it is because Teddy O is the author's mouthpiece. Throughout the novel there is a running patter about the things Vidal loves to hate: population growth, women writers who try to write like Henry Miller, hacks, agents, the so-called communications industry, and politicians. By now these subjects are part of the author's reflexology, though as a latter-day Restoration wit he can still bring them to life in cutting caricature.

The one subgroup that escapes the rake this time is writers of what Vidal likes to call "book chat." Perhaps he spared them because he was writing cul ture chat. He can be appropriately wist ful (a novel about the end of the race can not be all funny), but mainly Kalki is an amusing, brittle tissue of truths culled largely from the journalistic sources Vidal enjoys satirizing.

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