Though not strictly a satirist, the British novelist Hari Kunzru has been compared to writers of biting wit like Evelyn Waugh, and for good reason: His novels are so topical that, despite dramatic plots, their appeal is analytic and implicitly humorous. “My Revolutions” (Dutton, 288 pages, $25.95), his third novel, takes on the wry perspective of an aging hippie — one who may have actually participated in political violence but who, by 1998, is content to roll his eyes at his wife’s BMW.

The odd situation of the aging British countercultural generation, flummoxed by the complexities of the present, has also been mined profitably by Zadie Smith. And, like Ms. Smith, Mr. Kunzru has written about ethnicity in a way that implicates the whole society, making it merely one interest among many; in this novel, he has abandoned it as a subject almost entirely.

But themes of disorientation persist. His narrator, Chris Carver, is living under an alias — he is “Michael Frame” — and seems to have adopted the suburban ways of Chichester with all the bemused alienation of an actual immigrant. In his previous life, Michael Frame was a libertarian socialist who, after being arrested at a rally, turned radical, getting mixed up with communes and pretty girls who introduced him to a pared-down, militaristic group that eventually scared him. When his friends started working with Palestinians, Frame, né Carver, betrayed them and ran to Europe. He picked up a heroin habit and drifted overland all the way to Bangkok, where he ended up living for years in a monastery.

Decades later, living comfortably with a wife and college-age stepdaughter in Sussex, Frame begins to miss heroin — he longs to be numb and detached. An ever-suspicious acquaintance from the past, Miles Bridgeman, returns, drawing Frame back into his old life. In the ’60s, Miles was an amateur filmmaker, never quite a real revolutionary, but a genial, swinging presence in radical society. It turns out, however, that he was first a police informant, then a proper spy, and now wants Frame to help him blackmail a rising cabinet member who was once active on the political fringe.

With material like this, Mr. Kunzru doesn’t need to be funny. The vulnerabilities of this generation are more than obvious, and by basing his story on Britain’s little-known Angry Brigade, responsible for several historical bombings, Mr. Kunzru makes those vulnerabilities fresh and interesting again. The ideologies under discussion may be tediously utopian, but at least Mr. Kunzru finds characters who try to make them practicable, taking action.

Yet, as the book progresses, the somberness of political violence dampens the charm of Mr. Kunzru’s social critique. As a storyteller, he is effortlessly interesting: Each of his pages is packed with incident, all of it delicately judgmental, calibrated to propel our interest. “My Revolutions” begins to slow down only when Frame, now on the run from Miles and from his own past, lingers on his radical days for too long, letting his flashbacks outshine the ironies of his present.

And it is the tension between the present and the past that make the first part of “My Revolutions” so promising. Frame’s current wife, Miranda, is an impressive New-Agey entrepreneur, a soft hippie who drives a BMW and talks unironically about “alternative lifestyles.” She doesn’t know that she is married to a man with a secret identity, who once bombed governmental buildings. Frame indulges her, up to a point, while Miranda belittles Frame, imagining him to be lamely apolitical. The farce of this — and the dimension of forgiveness in Frame’s attitude toward Miranda — is an engine that could drive a great, moving comic novel. But the ongoing recollection of past details and current intrigue doesn’t develop these tensions; it overlooks them.

Indeed, the kind of detachment that Frame longs for belongs to him already. He is a glassy narrator, claiming the predictable emotions of regret and paranoia, but exhibiting an even, transparent mind. It would have been interesting to know what Miranda would say, after the novel’s last line, in which Frame divulges his real name and with it the fact of his buried past. Frame will probably gain a certain kind of high ground, but he will also have to apologize, and to pay deeply for the contradictions and deceptions on which his present life is built. But Mr. Kunzru does not go into it. The complex problems Frame should have with his past manifest themselves as simple stress — he drinks, he runs away. The emotional complexity that should set up his confession to Miranda is expressed, simply, as love. We are told that love, though not everything to a former enemy of the state, is “not nothing,” either. Other British political novelists, like Alan Hollinghurst, have included love in their stories, and it has amounted to more than the dollop of common decency Mr. Kunzru uses it as.

“My Revolutions” is basically a success, a thought-provoking and thoroughly readable story about England’s less-than-famous ’60s underground. Like Ms. Smith’s own third novel, “On Beauty,” it confirms Mr. Kunzru’s status as a social novelist of eminent facility, one who I expect will be able to stay relevant for many books to come. But that claim to relevance may become a crutch if tougher and more universal problems, such as love, are not squarely investigated, and satirized, in turn.

blytal@nysun.com