Books: Strangeloves Einstein's Monsters

Martin Amis, 37, is the gifted author of five novels, including the extravagantly comic Money: A Suicide Note. He is a second-generation angry young man who, unlike his father Kingsley Amis (Lucky Jim), nurtures his distemper from sources that go beyond the real and imagined injuries of Britain's class system. Einstein's Monsters consists of a long lead essay followed by five fantasies, all charged with forebodings of nuclear disaster. In addition to high verbal energy and flashes of satiric genius, the stories hum with the resentment and loathing of a man who fears for his natural ( patrimony, the earth, the sky and time itself.

The possibilities of atomic conflict breed mutant thoughts. "Suppose I survive," Amis speculates, "then -- God willing, if I still have the strength, and, of course, if they are still alive -- I must find my wife and children and I must kill them." In the parables that follow this shocking statement, a former circus strongman discovers his family murdered by London toughs, a case of schizophrenia mirrors a fractured universe, a dragon-size dog ritually feeds on the residents of a small village, and in the year 2020, time becomes a fatal disease. A recurrent theme is that the world has lost its grip, "has been to so many parties, been in so many fights, lost its keys, had its handbag stolen, drunk too much."

Elsewhere, Amis turns metaphysics into antic prose. A pathetically humorous character known as the Immortal has been and will be around forever ("If time is money, then I am the last of the big spenders") and has seen it all ("I had to hold my horses for quite a while before there were any human beings to hang out with . . . I sat through geology, waiting for biology"). History provides a brief interlude to the Immortal's loneliness, and he pleads with 20th century mortals, "Be careful -- you'll hurt yourselves. Please. Please try and stay a little longer."

As a messenger, Amis rejects British understatement. Each story proclaims its own logic and displays a conspicuous style. The effect is an imagining of the unimaginable -- vastly preferable to the megaton moralizing of nuclear nonfiction that makes the unthinkable unreadable.