1930's Hollywood, with its overripe stars, larger-than-life styles, extravagant successes and even more extravagant failures, and the nightmare barbarities of Hitler's Germany, make a strange juxtaposition here. "The Butterfly Plague" is full of unlikely juxtapositions, but they work to make the book consistently interesting, often disquieting, Mr. Findley's novel is an ambitious one, for he has chosen to deal with the nature of reality, the meaning of life and death and love, and the future of the human race. Despite a style and setting that sometimes verge on the campy, his unique way of perceiving people and places gives his book considerable power. "The Butterfly Plague" is mostly populated by grotesques, including a former Olympic medal swimmer who is a carrier of haemophilia and who is married to a virulent master-race Nazi; her brother; a Hollywood director; and her mother, dying of cancer. All of these people and...