How about taking a job as a private tutor to a rich woman's daughter, on a tropical island in the Florida Keys? Edwina Sabacthani needs someone to help her brain-damaged teenage scion, Londa, recover her wits. Before you can say "categorical imperative," Mason heads south.

On Isla de Sangre, Mason immediately enounters a bevy of weirdnesses. A sentient tree, talking iguanas—both the engineered offspring of the mysterious biologist, Dr. Charnock—as well as forbidden walled-off portions of the island. After meeting his disconcertingly sexy and aggressive pupil, Mason begins to investigate his new milieu. What he learns is this:

Edwina, incurably dying, has, with the aid of Dr. Charnock, created three clones of herself to inherit her vast fortune: Londa, the eldest, followed by Yolly and Donya. They have not developed naturally but been force-grown to a precarious maturity. They are blank canvases onto which Mason and some fellow tutors must paint a pretty picture.

Even after learning this, Mason and crew of fellow educators stay on. But Mason's success in instilling abstruse spiritual and philosophical knowledge into Londa's heart is going to have unpredictable consequences for them all. When Edwina finally dies, the girls are free to emerge into the world. And Londa intends to remake what she sees as a greedy and cruel civilization into a utopia according to the precepts Mason has instilled.

Mason signs off Londa's schemes at this point, departs and undergoes some harrowing life experiences of his own. But 10 years later, Londa has fashioned a city in Maryland known as Themisopolis, named after the Greek goddess of order and law. Her public protests and displays have earned her a large following and the nickname Dame Quixote. But she has also garnered conservative enemies, most notably the organization known as CHALICE. As these forces besiege Themisopolis, Mason will have to decide: Was he responsible for Londa's quest, and if so, what does he owe her and the world?

Barbed satire cloaks a love story

If James Morrow felt inspired by genre role models—in this outing, specifically, Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and Sturgeon's "When You Care, When You Love"—(and I think he did: note that almost on the final page of the book, a noble and praiseworthy Londa-inspired discussion group comes to meet in "the science-fiction and fantasy section" of a bookstore), they have been enfolded and superseded by grander literary models. Morrow is now working—very credibly—on levels inhabited by Voltaire, John Barth and Vladimir Nabokov. Yet he's doing so without disdaining his roots or sacrificing any of the entertainment value of genre work. That's a major accomplishment, and more power to him for elevating SF tropes and attitudes to such a lofty level.

From Voltaire, Morrow absorbs the notion of contrasting unworkable simon-pure philosophical stances—embodied in the Candide-like figure of Londa—with the exigencies of actual living. John Barth's masterpiece Giles Goat-Boy (1966) contributes notions of a naïve redeemer fighting entrenched power centers. Of course, Morrow's prose itself partakes also of Barth's stylistic flights of fancy, although never descending into the more tortured byways of Barth's excesses. And finally, the teacher-student-lover relation between Londa and Mason, as well as other stylistic refinements, derive from Nabokov's Lolita (1956).

But none of these writers was as determined and inventive a satirist as Morrow. He stuffs this book with so many scabrous, hilarious, laugh-or-cry assaults on mankind's folly that the reader hardly has time to register Semen on the Mount before encountering the notion of an anti-abortion army consisting of cloned fetuses.

And layered amid and betwixt all this good stuff is an actual touching love story between Londa and Mason, as well as an examination of matters of guilt, responsibility and justice.

Morrow's novel will leave you laughing so hard you won't realize you've been permanently changed until the next time you try to watch the news with a serious mien.