=Book recently read: Gould by Stephen Dixon=

It's really two novellas under one cover linked by a single character: Gould Bookbinder.

Gould is a guy who bears a striking resemblance to his creator, Stephen Dixon. He's a sometimes-teacher, perpetually struggling writer at odds with the dominant paradigm of the culture in which he lives. 

Dixon attempts to define Gould through his relationships with women. In the first novella, "Abortions," he quite literally tells his story  by tracing the different women Gould's been

involved with who've aborted   

fetuses Gould has implanted in their wombs.

You wouldn't think this would make a good narrative

device but, dammit, Dixon pulls it off.

His prose style is dense: long breathless sequences of sentences in paragraphs that can go on for pages with the dialogue embedded. It's tiring to read until you catch hold of the rhythm  & then , because of the lack of natural narrative breaks, it's 

hard to put the book down. One episode

bleeds seamlessly into the next &
your reluctant to interrupt the flow. 

At first, Gould is pretty much for the abortions, 

but as he grows older, he comes to want

children. The problem is that the women

he's impregnating are  compliant enough when it comes to having

sexual relationships with Gould but don't foresee Gould

as "forever," specifically as a very good potential provider , 
despite all his

protestations to the contrary. 

They just don't take him seriously as husband and father material.

Their view is complicated by the fact that Gould seems 

pretty genuine in his promises to  settle down, get a decent-paying

job, and be the man his hypothetical family needs.

On the occasions when his lover  already has a child from

a previous relationship, Gould proves himself to be a genuinely enthusiastic guardian. He really likes

children.
Go figure.

The second novella is called "Evangeline" and delves into greater depth about his relationship with a particularly difficult woman. All Gould's women are difficult to one degree or another, but Evangeline takes first prize.  She has a son to whom Gould becomes devoted. Of course, Gould is also attached to sex with Evangeline. He's attached to sex period. But with Evangeline the attachment is particularly strong & dysfunctional. This relationship is heading nowhere and they both see it but neither can quite put a definitive end to it. 

Well, not for a few years, anyway. 
After many starts and stops.

Eventually, though, the relationship does definitively end and Gould, we learn already in the first novella, ends ups up with a wife and two children of his own. In fact he's surreptitiously trying to get his wife pregnant with a third baby in spite of the fact that the woman is a semi-invalid with some unnamed chronic disease.

What kind of man does such a thing?

Well that really is the question that keeps you turning the pages of Gould. To Dixon's credit—and genius—he never quite answers it. Sometimes you feel sorry for Gould, other times he seems like the biggest a-hole in the world. You're rooting for him at one point and ashamed to have ever done so the next. He's a lovable oaf, a well-meaning if ineffectual mensch, a misunderstood genius, a typical guy who thinks too much with his dick, a hopeless romantic, a hopeless neurotic, an undiagnosed Aspergers sufferer, a potentially dangerous psychotic.

In the end you give up trying to define Gould at all. 

You realize that Gould, like the difficult women to which he perpetually becomes attached, like all of us, is a bag of unresolvable contradictions, beyond the simplicities of judgment, 

part angelic, part demonic…in short, 

a human being.

In the end, as impossible as he is to define,

he's nearly every bit as impossible to forget,

which is Stephen Dixon's real triumph

in this bifurcated & pleasantly distasteful 

fiction.