In Frederick Barthelme's new novel, Painted Desert, no matter where Del Tribute and his girlfriend, Jen, happen to be—at a coffee shop, a restaurant, the Holiday Inn—they seem also to be at some make-believe broadcasting studio, giving a frank interview. These are the grown children (he's 47, she's 27) of "Nightline" and "Larry King Live," both speaking in premeditatively reckless bursts meant to capture attention and glamorize their complaints. ("We're so cynical that our cynicism takes paint off warships.") These mediaholics are so painfully conscious of the planet—and so convinced that every aspect of it demands an epigrammatic opinion—that it's become a daily struggle just to keep abreast, to stay current. "If we're not actually going to participate in the world," Jen says, "If we're not going to do anything but watch it, then we might as well be good spectators."

It is June 1994, the week O. J. Simpson takes off in the white Bronco. Del, who's on vacation from his "dinky" teaching job at a junior college in Biloxi, agrees to drive to Baton Rouge to meet Jen's father, Mike. It's an awkward visit. A retired insurance man, Mike keeps bringing up the fact that Del is only six years younger than he is. "Doesn't that seem a little odd to you?" Mike says. Whenever he can, Del, hardly the most confrontational of men, slips away—to nap, to brood, to check what's on television.

As a narrator, Del Tribute—who, like Jen, appeared in Mr. Barthelme's previous novel, The Brothers—is a mixed blessing. He's witty and likable, personally kind and fully alert to detail, but his obsession with car crashes, plane wrecks, homicides and fires—what he calls "wonderful stuff"—can turn your stomach. Though Del is blind to his ghoulish proclivities, at least he's honest about the source of his political disgust. "Things weren't going to be fixed, and maybe I didn't want them fixed," he tells us. "I needed the mess to complain about, to point to when I wanted to devalue the system, or protect myself with a kind of alibi for my limited prosperity."

One evening at Mike's, while Del and Jen are watching a documentary, they see a videotape from the 1992 Los Angeles riots in which a truck driver's genitals are spray-painted by an assailant. While Del is mostly just amazed that he's never seen this footage before, Jen is outraged by it. On the spot, she decides to leave for California. She's not sure why, but it's—like, you know—a moral compulsion. Sort of. Besides, she and Del don't have anything else to do. And while they're out in L. A., they can go see Nicole Simpson's house. O. J.'s, too. And "where Rodney King got it."

Sounds like a plan.

To Del's chagrin, Mike—who also doesn't have anything else to do—asks to come along for the ride. He even offers the use of his big black Lincoln Town Car. Then Jen suggests a side trip to Shreveport, where they pick up her morose girlfriend Penny Gibson. At last they're off, California bound.

As so often happens in Mr. Barthelrne's stories, events don't follow human intention. Destination doesn't either. Jen's angry pilgrimage, a muddled venture from the start, turns into a meandering, touristy swing through the Southwest, with impulse visits to Dallas (Dealey Plaza, of course); Roswell, N.M. (a U.F.O. museum); White Sands; the Grand Canyon, and finally the Painted Desert. Oddly, while these episodes present some of Mr. Barthelme's best descriptive writing (much of it could be excerpted without tinkering for a superb travel article), they also contain his weakest, least persuasive fiction.

Because of Del's lack of access to Mike and Penny's private moments, their budding romance seems almost perfunctory, while Jen's on-the-road E-mail correspondence with a homicidal maniac raises ethical and legal issues the novel has no thought of seriously addressing. But it's the conclusion that is most disappointing—and disingenuous.

Mr. Barthelme strongly and seductively suggests that for sheer weirdness, exhilaration and fun, the information superhighway is still no match for the old-fashioned macadam one, but it would take more than "a tittle bit of first-order experience, a little bit of contact with the ground, a little reminder of the wonder of things" to make a pair of hard-wired pessimists like Del and Jen suddenly "feel like saints" and decide to get married. Call me unromantic, call me a killjoy, but I just don't believe it.