SYNOPSIS

Suppose you were given exclusive information about a secret plan for nuclear disaster. You might respond exactly as the two unlikely heroes of Philip Slater’s first novel do—you’d try to save the world. For Grace Castleman and Taylor Bishop, it all started with that damned spider…

An innocent spider first puts dreamy, eccentric Taylor on the trail of a secret plot to bring the nuclear destruction to a large American city. Thus aroused from his California languor, Taylor teams up with his friend Grace, a feminist anthropology professor and cynic extraordinaire, and travels from laid-back Las Lunas on a mad trip across America, following the trail of a sinister Defense Department project, the deadly “Donald Duck.”

Along the way they gather a remarkable cast of oddballs. Louise, an off-the-wall Indian medicine woman, shows them how to work a “Gormanizer.” Polly Morphus, a punk singer, comes along after narrowly escaping violent death while performing with her group, “Crushed Nuts.” Bran, a professor of Russian, completes the core group—but the gang encounters many others: some deceivingly conventional suburban neighbors in Cambridge, Mass.; an ominous figure Grace calls “the Admirable Cretin”; and the sinister Delbert Sneath, who manages to track the group from Denver to Cambridge and eventually to a remote island off the Maine coast where Taylor and Grace come under the thumb of a madman.

Philip Slater proves to have a marvelous, light touch with fiction, and exposes a host of absurdities in American life: California life-styles, academic pretension, government bureaucracies, the mores of middle-class American barbecues, and the masochistic pace of Manhattanites, among many other aspects of American life in the ‘80s. The novel is both funny and suspenseful—usually both at the same time. Even with the nuclear clock ticking, Taylor and Grace never lose their delight in life’s absurdities as they pursue their exciting, often misguided efforts to fulfill their mission.