Post-mortem : GOULD: A Novel in Two Novels.<i> By Stephen Dixon</i> .<i> Henry Holt: 277 pp., $24</i>

In forensic pathology it is no paradox that however brilliant the dissection, the subject remains indifferently dead. That distinguishes it from other branches of medicine, where discovery obtainable by some ultimate feat of scalpel-wielding takes second place to saving the patient’s life.

Both the traditional scalpel-work of literature and its modernist and postmodernist CT scans--showing us things we never could see before--are mostly for the purpose of delivering life. Admittedly the line is thin. No two readers will agree just where Henry James’ dissections elucidate dead instead of living matter or whether, by the seventh volume of “Remembrance of Things Past,” Proust’s wine had begun to pick up the corky whiff of his soundproofed walls.

Making inventive use of first-rate literary equipment and technique, Stephen Dixon delivered a formidable jolt of American life in “Interstate,” published two years ago. In “Gould: A Novel in Two Novels,” Dixon’s technique remains remarkable--in the excursions and self-interruptions of sentences that undulate like serpents and strike like their fangs, in speech that pierces equally the speaker and the listener.

Dixon wields these devices and others--the second “novel” that is simply a different perspective upon the first--with both success and failure. The success lies in the detailed delineation of Gould Bookbinder, his protagonist, as male principle carried to the extreme, an extreme where it becomes its own prisoner and victim.

The failure lies in the unrelenting thoroughness of the success. Gould is utterly revealed as a civilized monster, but the revelation is that of an autopsy. We see every tiny blood vessel, each nerve ending, the precise chemical decay of decent into baleful impulse. Only from a specimen lying dead and dissected could such precision be obtained.

“Gould” is the biography of a man in terms of his relationship with women. We learn virtually nothing else about him. He is the only son of solicitous parents. He goes to college in California, does some semi-privileged drifting for a while and eventually becomes a professor and book critic. Essentially, though, his story is the life cycle of the imperial male sexual impulse from late adolescence to middle age.

Dixon takes it through its transformations over the years, from naked physical lust at one end to an equally naked passion to produce children at the other and a series of gradations in between. The only constant is the assertion of power and the treatment of women as conduits--of pleasure, at first, and of procreation later. It is the more shocking because Gould’s voice is discursive, witty, amiably rueful, the voice of a Woody Allen before the headlines hit.

“Abortions” is the title of the first and principal novel. It is the starkest of devices: Dixon tells the stories of six women Gould is involved with in terms of the abortions or miscarriages for which he has been responsible. Each story and each terminated pregnancy has a different quality and meaning.

The first is Gould’s affair, as a college freshman, with a woman two years older. It is the turbulent, unbridled physical urgency of late adolescence, sharpened by the constraints and fears of the time, the 1950s. She gets pregnant, they go to an abortionist. His only concern, when they leave, is how soon they can have sex--that and his careful lie about how much money he can contribute.

In the second affair, Gould is out of college and in with an arty set in New York. He meets a vivid, free-spirited dancer; his passion is as much for her dizzy lifestyle as for her lean, muscular body. She dumps him after a month or two, then phones, pregnant, and asks for help. He hesitates, eventually decides to send a little money, then reduces the figure, then sends nothing. A few months later a friend tells him she is dead of a drug overdose; his twinge of regret is no bigger than a hangover.

At graduate school he conducts a zany, word-intoxicated seduction of a sweet, plain classmate. She falls deeply in love; he pulls away after a while despite her pleas. He prides himself for his decency in forgoing easily available sex--it has all the humane quality of somebody refusing a second pastry for the sake of his figure. Later, the woman lets him know that she has induced a miscarriage; she--far more interesting than he--writes calmly, perkily and with only faint scars of pain. He fantasizes mildly about fathering a child he would, of course, never think of seeing.

It is the beginnings of a progenitive itch that will become far more greedy and abusive than any lust. There is his deliberate impregnation of a married woman and his unsuccessful effort to trace her and her son years later. There is a nightmarish sequence in his 30s when his lover tells him she is pregnant and will have an abortion. He shocks her by insisting that she must have the baby; when she refuses, he threatens to abduct her and force her to have it. He does, in fact, tie her up for a day or so--the scene is both absurd and horrifying.

The unbearable horror comes after Gould is married, with two children, and his wife develops multiple sclerosis. She is in a wheelchair and deteriorating, yet Gould presses her to have a third child. She refuses but soon is unable to insert her diaphragm; he does it with deliberate clumsiness and she conceives. When the medication she takes to slow down the paralysis produces a miscarriage, Gould persists: We last see him urging her to stop the medication.

The second, shorter novel is a light counterpoint to the first. It tells of Gould’s 20-year on-and-off relationship with a quirky, self-centered woman to whose son Gould fervently tries to play father. Here, he is the weaker one and the woman is in command. It is not a very serious command. The texture of this second part is too scattered and insubstantial to have much more than a notional bearing on the intense first part. It dangles.

There is a faint ambiguity in “Gould.” Is Dixon allowing some place for a father’s claim in the abortion debate, despite the awfulness of this particular would-be father--or perhaps even because of the awfulness? (Madness, that is, out of authentic deprivation.) It seems more likely that the awfulness is meant to negate the claim. Certainly Gould’s engendering mania is, prima facie, an abuse.

So far I have written as if Dixon’s novel were a place the reader was being wafted through to view its features and qualities. Attention must be paid to the feet and the trudging. There are 277 pages and only one paragraph. Paragraphs, we realize, are like windows. The air in “Gould” becomes thick and heavy.

It is deliberate, of course. The effect is to closet us more closely with the underlying monstrosity of the civilized and undeniably sensitive protagonist. But the effect is also to heighten our sense of a lifeless figure with arrestingly distinct features. He is Dixon’s quarry; having hunted him down, the author has skinned and dissected him.