DATE: Sunday, March 16, 1997                TAG: 9703060518

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY LENORE HART 

                                            LENGTH:   72 lines

DEVICE DIVIDES DIXON'S CHARACTERS

GOULD

A Novel in Two Novels

STEPHEN DIXON

Henry Holt. 277 pp. $24.

Though the latest work by two-time National Book Award nominee Stephen Dixon is billed as ``a novel in two novels,'' it's something more prosaic: two novellas. The first is ``Abortions,'' that procedure being the mnemonic device by which protagonist Gould Bookbinder recalls his many failed relationships. Book two is ``Evangeline,'' after a California divorcee who needs a handyman. Gould applies.

Gould is not just uneasy in his skin; he seems unaware he has one. He invents roles and personas, only to discard each like a cheap sweatsuit.

Gould is first encountered in ``Abortions'' as a college student in the late 1940s, seducing an older woman. He's a sexually predatory Eddie Haskell loose in Cleverland, flattering and bullying as he mentally catalogs female body parts, intellect, defects, grooming, smells. He worries constantly about whether his access to quick, regular sex might be cut off, however briefly. He says later to this same woman, as they leave an abortionist: ``I don't know if I'll be able to hold out on the intercourse for as long as the doctor said.''

A monster of manipulation, he accompanies and provides cash, but lies about his finances so he doesn't have to pay it all. Later even this flare-up of responsibility dims. By the time he's graduated and working half-heartedly in New York, he can rationalize that he needn't trouble to help finance the second abortion - needed by a free-spirited black dancer who later overdoses.

With age Gould acquires a different outlook. He wants to belong, or at least reproduce. He's not keen on marriage, so is pleased, while traveling, to encounter a violist named Miriam. She'd like a second child. Her law professor-husband likes sleeping with his students.

Gould decides he'd like ``having a hold on her and maybe even a child if she wanted it or he could persuade her to keep it or just something troublesome they went through like an abortion that would sort of seal something between them and where he could fly to Madison for it or the birth if she wanted him to and her husband didn't object . . . ''

For all his elaborate puppetry, Gould isn't very persuasive. An educated ``intellectual,'' he suffers like a big dumb animal, banging his thick head against his delusions. No surprise that soon he's ``almost 40, never married, childless, seeing a woman for almost two years, they'd broken up during that period for a few days, weeks, once for a month.'' By the next abortion, he wants the baby, she doesn't. Gould's solution? Strongarm the woman into her bedroom and hold her captive for a couple days, because ``things are different now, a kid's a kid, a pregnancy's not an ordinary . . . a - But let me get my thoughts collected, on line, I'm altogether confused . . . ''

Years later, he schemes to impregnate his ailing, unwilling wife (he finally gets one) with a third child.

In Evangeline, Gould and the divorcee are lovers by the evening of his first day on the job. The lasting attraction is partly her young son, for whom Gould feels paternal affection. But in this section the author seems to lose control; the constantly revising non-linear story becomes a circular rehash of repetitive events between nasty characters. They're real enough, the variety that inspires me, in life, to quickly duck down another grocery aisle in hopes of avoidance.

Poor Gould's a clueless chameleon, unable to function without constantly creating new illusions for himself and those around him. While reading ``Abortions,'' I evolved from disgusted voyeur to grudging sympathizer. About two-thirds into ``Evangeline,'' I lost it. Enough already.

Perhaps Dixon should have forgone the experimental trappings, and incorporated ``Evangeline'' as a lesser part of ``Abortions.'' His ``novel in two novels'' left me hungry for a no-frills, old-fashioned, all-in-one tale. MEMO: Lenore Hart, the author of ``Black River,'' is a novelist who

lives on the Eastern Shore.

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