Starting Over Again at Ground Zero : THE ORGAN BUILDER <i> by Robert Cohen (Harper & Row: $17.95; 288 pp.) </i>

To the arsenal of “postmodern” literary labels I would like to add the term postfeminist and apply it to Robert Cohen’s fascinating novel, “The Organ Builder.”

Cohen’s hero, like the heroes of so many first novels, is a young man coming to terms with his early life; his journey is a quest for an absent father whose memory he has long repressed. What makes the novel postfeminist is not that the gulf between the sexes has been bridged; women are clearly as mysterious to this author as to any man since creation. But consciously or unconsciously, Cohen has recast the movement from father to son--which traditionally builds, adds, grows, occasionally declines but moves into the future, always forward--in the shape of a feminine history.

Wall Street lawyer Herschel Freeman (Hesh) is beginning to realize that he lacks the energy to manage the brilliant career he has embarked on. The moment is passing when he ought to make a bid for partnership in his firm. His marriage has crumbled. And during visits with his 7-year-old son, the correct fatherly gestures seem to elude him. Through flashbacks to Hesh Freeman’s childhood in New Mexico, we learn that his father, Eli Friedmann (Hesh’s change of name contains obvious irony), was one of the physicists involved in the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. After the parents separate, the father disappears.

Into Hesh’s holding pattern swoops Arthur Gordon, documentary film maker and quintessential Californian--confident, gregarious and talkative. He is making a film about the Manhattan Project and has tracked Hesh down as a link to the missing physicist. Hesh’s reluctant participation in the project is secured by the charms of Arthur’s wife, Abby. Hesh’s fate is sealed when his firm takes up a case in New Mexico. Senior partner Charlie Goldwyn wants Hesh along in the West as confidant to his love affair with the young female attorney representing his Navajo opponents.

Charlie represents a blurring of the masculine and feminine. Who could be more masculine than Charlie, who plays poker, carries his great belly with pride and tyrannizes his minions in the office? Yet he falls in love with an abandon that can only be called unmanly. This is more than mid-life crisis; it is chaos.

While the lawsuit and the film making proceed and Charlie’s life unravels, Hesh follows the threads to his father, with an escapist and adulterous detour to Mexico with Abby. Things increasingly fall apart, as flashbacks, narrated mostly by Hesh’s father Eli, draw closer to the first atomic explosion.

“The Organ Builder” contains distinct flaws. The first-person narration of Hesh’s chapters clashes with the objective narration elsewhere; the dialogue, too often combining tough talk with cheap philosophizing, sits poorly with the beautiful prose; certain syntactical constructions occur too frequently. One also wishes Cohen had been a bit more discreet about his love affair with the adjective, though the romance produces some striking effects. But this is the art that novelists develop over a lifetime.

Some readers may be disappointed that a novel with the atomic bomb at its center does not make a thundering political statement, but what Cohen does is much more masterful. One of the strongest images in the book is the breathless wait during countdown to the first test explosion. No one knows whether “the device” will work; there is the possibility that the Earth’s atmosphere may ignite.

We know what followed the Manhattan Project, but Hesh’s revelation is that after the war his father metaphorically continued the countdown backward, with the explosion as starting point and moment of creation. In contrast to his fellow scientists who continued the work of the Atomic Age, Friedmann followed his own thoughts inward and backward (implosion as well as explosion) toward a more primitive technology. The movement of history forward and backward is indistinguishable, the novel concludes; each generation begins at ground zero, and Cohen closes the circle as Hesh ends with thoughts of his own son.