BOOK REVIEW : Exasperating Journey Leads to Nowhere : AN HONORABLE PROFESSION <i> by John L’Heureux</i> , Viking; $19.95, 345 pages

If you overmanipulate pie dough, the crust comes out heavy. If you mix too many colors, the color comes out muddy.

Miles Bannon, a passionate and prickly high school English teacher, goes through as many identity-testing moral and emotional crises as Pauline went through in her Perils. By the end of John L’Heureux’s novel, “An Honorable Profession,” Miles is as unfledged as ever. We feel we have trudged through bogs and quicksands with him, and still our feet are in the same place.

It is not a matter of “Once Upon A Time,” or of “What Happens to Miles?” It is a matter of “Eight Or Nine Times Upon a Time,” and of “What Doesn’t Happen to Miles?”

Miles’ exasperating and beloved mother is dying from a form of Lou Gehrig’s disease. He struggles with stony-hearted hospital administrators and all the small, deadly decisions of a bedside deathwatch. Margaret, his loyal and underappreciated mistress, goes into a suicidal pill-and-alcohol frenzy. Painfully cured, she drops him.

His apparently severe fellow-teacher, Diane, coldly initiates him into wild bouts of sex, and then drops him, equally coldly, to apply to Harvard Law School. His principal, resenting Miles’ air of intellectual superiority, is trying to dig up dirt on him.

Confused about his desires, Miles has a one-night-stand with a sophisticated homosexual he meets in Boston’s raunchy Combat Zone. Billy, one of his students, falls passionately in love with him and kills himself when Miles puts him off. Billy’s father, an embittered cop, stirs up a scandal that gets into the papers. Miles, it is suggested, had been irresponsible or worse.

And when Miles goes to church at midnight and rousts out a priest to talk to, the priest turns out to be having a breakdown of his own.

“Was the whole world desperate?” the protagonist asks himself at one point.

Certainly, the whole world is baleful; even the students are fickle and mean. L’Heureux, whose novel “A Woman Run Mad” gave frequently brilliant voice to some blood-curdling extremities, flounders in this one. Miles’ world, a suburban high school and community outside Boston, has Inferno-like properties. Miles is too inchoate and unstable to be able to lead us through it.

Some of the individual episodes are vividly done. Even dying, Miles’ mother is very much alive. While her lungs have to be suctioned out and her drooping eyelids taped open to allow her to see, she surmounts the depersonalization of her condition. Miles’ interview with a cost-conscious hospital functionary is a sharp vignette of the contemporary health bureaucracy.

Diane, the puritanical nymphomaniac, is simply a grotesque. So is the small-minded principal, a conceited and self-willed fellow teacher who helps fan the suspicion that Miles is a sex abuser, and Billy’s monomaniacally vengeful father.

Billy is droopy and colorless; his suicide is the melodramatic result of a passion the author asserts without communicating. Other characters who play a direct or indirect part in Miles’ persecution are not even cartoons: They’re captions, at best.

The swelling up and the eventual puncturing of the Miles scandal have moments of interest, but they are too loosely done to be particularly credible or involving. Overwriting does not help. When his class watches expectantly as Miles opens a scurrilous anonymous note in front of them, L’Heureux writes:

“He was just raw meat, exposed, and they knew--his whole world knew--that if you touched him, you would get blood on your hands.”

When the fates relent, they do so even more arbitrarily than they had ganged up in the first place. The police drop the investigation, Billy’s father is killed in a car crash and the school board, guided by a clear-minded lawyer, dismisses the vindictive principal and rewards Miles with a small raise. At the end, he and Margaret seem headed for a reconciliation.

The Miles who comes out of the labyrinth of ordeals is the same as the Miles who went in. At least, he seems to be. He was formless at the start, he is formless at the end; perhaps it is an altered formlessness.

Next: Bettyann Kevles reviews “Bodies, Pleasures and Passions: Sexual Culture in Contemporary Brazil,” by Richard G. Parker (Beacon Press).