The world was his Roach Motel

Soon, he's dating Alice Paul, founder of the National Women's Party, fresh from her success passing the 19th Amendment. Their romance ends painfully, as you can imagine, but he learns much from her courageous faith in equality. And she introduces him to Charles Ives, the composer, who finds in Gregor the inspiration to keep writing his radical symphonies of the discordant forces gripping the world.

Disregard the legal disclaimer about "any resemblance to actual persons living or dead" being "entirely coincidental." A note at the end lists 60 biographies and histories the author consulted to assemble this massive tour of science, culture, and politics. Halfway through, after learning about everything from X-rays to risk management, I began to wonder, Is there anything Estrin doesn't know? It's only a matter of time before this new cult classic inspires a companion collection of footnotes and commentary.

Indeed, if "Insect Dreams" weren't so perpetually funny, its philosophical ruminations and its encyclopedia of cameo appearances would be downright intimidating. In the most natural ways, Estrin manages to insinuate Gregor into the major developments of the first half of the 20th century. (Roaches can fit into the tiniest places, you know.)

Gregor scurries from the Scopes trial to Los Alamos, from the Japanese internment camps to the White House. Everywhere, he's omnivorously attentive, his antennae so sensitive to the pheromones of beauty and cruelty passing around him. He's indefatigably childlike, ever hopeful, but constantly baffled by gross inequities and profoundly concerned about mankind's tendency toward fear and avarice. And he's always ready to stand (upright, if necessary) as an example of gentleness and compassion, but he can't help wondering: "Was he - doubly inhuman - up to his imagined task of helping humanize humanity?" (Eleanor Roosevelt counsels him, in a moment of discouragement, to be himself, "to bring the blessings of genuine roachness to the people around him.")

As Gregor and history fly toward the cataclysmic conclusion of World War II, Christ images swarm through the narrative. The testimonies of cruelty mount, his heroes fail him, and humanity seems drawn toward apocalypse. While millions go up in smoke in Europe, cynical intellectuals retreat into cocoons of despair, and, in the darkest moments, Gregor weeps, but he refuses to give up.

Ultimately, "Insect Dreams" is a compilation of our dreams. It's the kind of book from which one wakes clutching surreal scenes, desperate to tell others, delighted and baffled and horrified. Of course, Gregor makes a particularly peculiar savior; what do we need the moral example of a frail insect for - so despised and dejected of men? But stranger things have happened.

• Ron Charles is the Monitor's book editor. Send e-mail tocharlesr@csmonitor.com.

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