EVERYTHING MATTERS! Ron Currie Jr. Viking. 305 pages. $25.95.

Astronomers at Caltech say the Earth will last a billion years longer than previous estimates, which makes me wish I'd chosen the bedroom wallpaper more carefully. But Ron Currie's strange new novel raises the opposite prospect: Everything Matters! begins with an announcement that a comet will destroy our planet on June 15, 2010. That fast-approaching deadline raises ``a question which men and women, great and not-so, of every color, creed, and sexual persuasion have asked since they first had the language to do so, and probably before: Does Anything I Do Matter?''

In a sense, every novel is a search for what matters, so posing the problem here in Caps and italics is not the subtlest move a writer can make. But there's something refreshingly youthful about Currie's eagerness to call out big existential questions that most of us have grown too embarrassed or cynical to ask since we scraped through Intro to Philosophy and moved on to matters of getting and spending. He's writing for the Slaughterhouse-Five kids, people who respond to that quirky mix of dark humor, moral imperative and science fiction. Like Vonnegut, Currie is an atheist -- his first novel, just out in paperback, is titled God Is Dead -- and that absence of faith seems to have left him with an intense curiosity about how we live in a world without divine oversight or intervention.

Everything Matters! focuses on the immensely consequential life of John ''Junior'' Thibodeau, ''the fourth-smartest person in the history of the world.'' We meet him in 1974, in utero, before he has to ''master the involuntary coos and facial twitches which are the foundation of infantile cuteness.'' The narrator of this section is an omniscient Voice, a sort of cosmic, tough-love therapist that exists outside time and space and maintains a ''long-standing policy of supportive neutrality.'' It speaks directly to Junior as though conducting an experiment: ''Throughout your life, no matter how long or brief, the choice is, in the end yours. Simply bear in mind that most every choice will have consequences.'' But then the Voice drops the ultimate buzzkill about the comet.

So, this is a novel in which cosmology becomes personal: How would you live if you knew that everything will be destroyed when you're 36 years old? The question inspires despair and sarcasm in equal measure, but Currie never makes fun of humanity's predicament, even though he's often funny. ''Irony,'' one character notes, ``is a luxury the doomed can't afford.''

There's nothing predictable about this story, and Currie repeatedly upends our expectations. What's most surprising is how interested he remains in Junior's mother, father, brother and girlfriend, who aren't burdened with knowing when the world will end.

Currie is prone to abrupt shifts in tone, from quiet monologues by Junior's smoldering father to a corny medical melodrama, from a tragicomic act of terrorism to a frightening scene of torture. The story wobbles even more erratically when we get some goofy scenes involving a secret government agency and a scheme to move lucky citizens to another planet.

But Currie's real interest is how people choose to behave when everything seems ''a messy and heartbreaking and overall pointless affair.'' Of course, that kind of despair doesn't require any inside knowledge about the end of the world; nobody needs a planet-crushing comet to justify hopelessness. The apocalypse, Currie suggests, comes to each of us individually, and how we respond in the face of our own inevitable darkness is what really matters.

Ron Charles reviewed this book for The Washington Post.

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