The hippie kingdom has been succeeded by the republic of hard times, and T. Coraghessan Boyle has written a shrewd and funny novel about the rites of historical passage, “Budding Prospects” gets this across by way of a wonderfully collapsing grand scheme and a bedraggled hero who emerges from it with the odd suspicion that the truest form of escape may lie in the real world.

The real agricultural world, to be precise, Boyle, whose first novel was the lively and well-praised “Water Music,” has given his second the subtitle of “A Pastoral.” And, amid its absurdist humor, its funk, its Northern California ambiance of pot, beer, highways, splendid scenery and lots of pricey equipment, that's what it is.

Since Ken Kesey, we have had a quarter-century or so of solipsist clownery and charm. The exuberance, drunks, harebrained schemes, large expeditions and fundamental motionlessness—the protagonists drive and raise hell but they are essentially supine—grow weary. Boyle starts in their midst and, in his individual and remarkably controlled way, works quite a distance out.

Felix, the narrator, is a comfortably drifting San Franciscan who supports himself by teaching a little English and has managed to grow less and less involved with anything. “I've always been a quitter,” he says at the start, and lists among the other things he's taken on and abandoned: the Boy Scouts, his paper route, his basketball team, marriage, a Ph. D. and so on.

What he does in the book is move some; not a lot, and not in a straight line, but still some; enough to provide a current of energy to the story's wacky improbabilities and to end up in the left-handed kind of assertion.

In brief, Felix is approached by Vogelsang, a flourishing superschemer who is good at everything—deals, karate, sex, living splendidly—but is never really there. A former CIA agent, he cooks gourmet meals for his friends while eating fish-based trail mix. Even his digestion is undercover.

Vogelsang is recruiting for a scheme to grow 300 acres of marijuana on a remote mountain farm. Felix and two of his friends take the job on with the hope of netting one-third of a projected $1.5-million profit. The time for lollygagging is over, they tell themselves; the era of primitive capitalist accumulation is about to begin. Or, as Felix and his friends put it:

“The whole hippie ethic—beads, beards, brotherhood, the community of man—it had all been bullshit, a subterfuge to keep us from realizing that there were no jobs, the economy was in trouble and the resources of the world going up in smoke…We know what counted: money. Money and nothing else.”

They spend a summer slaving away, contending with rain, fire, bears, rats, suspicious neighbors, blackmail and the threats of a police raid. One disaster after another gradually whittles their expectations down until, by the end, the $500,000 is reduced to a bare $15,000. Vogelsang, or course, does very well.

It is a comic disaster on the classic and irresistible theme of the scalawag out-scalawagged. Boyle handles the day-to-day misadventures the befuddled relationship of three city hicks with each other and with the wilderness they are turned loose upon, with superb control and timing. He has written a first-rate picaresque adventure with a subplot about the neighboring farmer and his idiot son that combines slapstick and subtlety, and two others, only fair, about a maniacal California Highway Patrolman and an earth-mother potter who helps liberate Felix from his detachment. It rambles and sashays nicely, through sometimes it trips up when its prose slips from exuberance to hyperactivity.

There is more to “Budding Prospects,” though, than an entertainment seductively told. The notion of Felix and his companions living through the agricultural agonies of drainage, nitrogen content, adverse weather, irrigation lines chewed up by marauders, rats among the seedlings, and so on, and all for the sake of 2,000 pounds of harvested pot, is comical enough. But something else is going on.

“To my horticultural friends,” the dedication reads, and Boyle is spoofing, but not just spoofing. Pot or wheat, there is a primeval challenge in struggling with the mountain, in digging and fencing and growing things; in Nature, in short. Felix, the perennial quitter and easy-lifter, is bitten.

“Something had happened to me over the course of the past few weeks, something that transformed me with each crank of the come-along and thrust of the shovel: I'd become a believer,” he says. “How else could I have gone on, day after day, pitching dirt and hammering fence posts like a flunky? How else if I wasn't certain in the very root of my being, in the last looping curve of my innermost gut, that we would succeed?”

He quotes “Poor Richard's Almanac,” that chapbook of the homely virtues: “No gains without pains.” “Plough deep…and you shall have corn to sell and to keep.” And continues: “Yes, indeed. We would subdue the land, make it produce, squeeze the dollars from it through sacrifice, sheer force of the Yankee gumption. It was the dream of the pioneers themselves.”

It is Boyle's skill that both Felix and we are aware of the simultaneous incongruity and authenticity of what is happening. If Felix is quite primitively caught by the smell of turned earth consumed with the blood-lust against a marauding bear, we are quite simply caught by the account of the struggle. We want those plants to grow.

It is the best kind of irony; the kind that nourishes. The venture is ridiculous, a swindle, a financial end as at the beginning, he remains baroque and self-aware. He does not depart from his own music. What he does is to take his music and move along—up the coast to the potter earth-mother and, presumably, the notion that life is worked and worked for.