Kipper's Game by Barbara Ehrenreich

Della Markson is searching for her son, a brilliant, nihilistic computer hacker who has invented an addictive computer game. She teams up with her former professor, Alex MacBride, an academic has-been desperately in need of a publication and a drink, is looking for the papers of an obscure, long-dead neurobiologist. As they stumble through a suburban landscape littered with broken marriages and blighted careers, they discover that their personal quests are of great interest to mysterious others, and that they have been drawn into a grand design full of wondrous possibilities and perilous meanings.

For Della and Alex live in a hyper-real world of strange portents and accelerating decay. Caterpillars are destroying the trees. A cracked but eerily lucid evangelist preaches apocalypse on a pirate frequency. And in the renowned biological research institute where Della and Alex work, escaped laboratory animals roam the corridors, hazardous wastes leak unchecked, and a lethal new disease is outwitting the researchers. The search for Della's son and Alex's missing papers turns out to hinge on the ancient quest for the ultimate purpose of human intelligence and life.

A startling feat of the imagination from one of our sharpest social observers, Kipper's Game is a daring and sophisticated adventure at the interface of science and metaphysics, human love and the equally human hunger for knowledge.