Children's Ward

By John Skow

TITLE: OPERATION WANDERING SOUL

AUTHOR: RICHARD POWERS

PUBLISHER: MORROW; 352 PAGES; $23

THE BOTTOM LINE: A brilliant, flawed book, more stage set than novel, portrays doomed children in a dying society.

Novelist Richard Powers is a prodigiously talented manufacturer of literary astonishments, which is not exactly the same as being a good writer, though he is that too. His novel The Gold Bug Variations was widely praised as one of the best books of 1991. But whenever one of his narratives loses its forward motion, as happens early in this big, messy, off-and-on brilliant novel, Powers tends to go for flash. He sets off skyrockets, then more skyrockets. Great, arcing bursts of language streak across not just pages but whole chapters. (On pollution: "Maroon-brown patinas of condensing air . . . the noxious residue, the breakdown skeins of hydrocarbon linkages . . .") Then, before the afterimage can fade, the bedazzled firmament detonates again in grander, wilder colors. Great stuff, the reader thinks, and does anyone have an aspirin?

The setting is the pediatrics ward of a Los Angeles charity hospital, where (it hardly needs to be said, since serious fiction seems to have no other topic as our troubled millennium ticks away) civilization is banging and whimpering toward its well-deserved end. The characters are Kraft, a harried, too sensitive surgeon-in-training; Espera, a gallant nurse; and an appalling procession of dying children. The doomed kids arrive by ambulance and taxi, bleeding from gunshot wounds, septic with cancers both physical and psychological, withering from every disease in the manual. Kraft prunes and hacks and catheterizes; Espera listens and comforts; the children bleed and expire.

As children have always bloodily expired, Powers writes in his mood of apocalyptic gloom. His hero, tormented by daymares and night sweats, broods by the dozens of pages over the medieval horror of the Children's Crusade, relishes at chapter-length the cold irony of the Pied Piper legend, written out with speaking parts for everyone except the rats. Writhing as he pares away wrecked body parts, Kraft imagines, for the duration of a novella, cynical child abuse during the evacuation of London's children at the time of the blitz (rural lechers taking the pretty preteens into their homes, ignoring the fat and ugly). His mental videotape also conjures, or recalls, a young Thai girl blown to red vapor by a land mine.

These desperate, obsessively repeated evocations of a fouled world are brutally convincing. But they are merely grotesque, shifting stage sets, not the novel's action. And the failing of Operation Wandering Soul (aside from a surprisingly lame title) is that amid all its commotion, not much happens. Kraft and Espera try to have a romance, but they are too benumbed to make it work. Some of the hospital's sick children, not very convincingly, take a Pied Piper skit on tour. The author tells us that his hero is modeled after his own older brother, a surgeon, and sure enough, "Kraft" can be translated from German as power. The clue fits; despite mighty imaginings, the admiring younger brother has been too deferential to invent a story.