Gould, the fictional narrator, shares his thoughts about his life, real and imagined, from his past, through the mundane world of the present, to his dreams for the future, recalling a full range of regrets, mishaps, bad decisions, obsessions, fears, and anxieties. 12,500 first printing. Tour. Over the course of a long career, Stephen Dixon has never been bitten by the minimalist bug, or even lightly grazed by it. His books tend toward the big-boned and expansive, and his prose--with its steamroller pacing and superabundance of sensual detail--is maximal down to the last comma. With 30 , however, the author may have exceeded even his own record for literary megatonnage. Weighing in at 672 pages, this novel seems at least twice that long: at times the dense, unparagraphed pages feel like a challenge to the reader's attention span and eyesight. Still, Dixon can't be faulted for his ambition, which is to capture his protagonist's experience with a kind of hair-trigger fidelity. Gould Bookbinder (who first appeared in the novel of the same name) is to be a late 20th-century Everyman, deluged with more facts and feelings than he can possibly handle. Take this passage, in which Gould is merely standing on a Manhattan street corner with a toddler: He's waiting for the light to change on Amsterdam, cars roaring north past him, on his way to see his mother, got off the bus on Broadway, unfolded the stroller, and strapped Fanny in; now she's sleeping peacefully, head to one side, hair spilled over her face and both hands holding a shaggy stuffed animal, when a sudden breeze moves the stroller a little and he grabs the right cane-shaped handle with one hand and then a terrific wind and he's about to grab the other handle when the stroller's lifted a few inches off the ground and he lunges at it and misses and it's blown into the avenue and lands on its wheels a few feet away.... Never fear: despite the Battleship Potemkin scenario, Gould quickly yanks the stroller back to safety. But the paragraph, which includes several hundred more words in this vein, encapsulates both the author's strengths (meticulous tabulation of human life) and weaknesses (dull and indiscriminate tabulation of human life). Elsewhere the hero reminisces, sleeps around, writes, and pursues a belly dancer on a cruise ship. Dixon fans will treasure his excellent adventures, which are ingeniously apportioned into 30 segments. Doubters, however, may find a little too much fool's Gould for their taste. --William Davies What more is there to say about Gould Bookbinder, the sex-obsessed antihero of Gould: A Novel in Two Novels (LJ 1/97)? Dixon has come up with 30 more chapters of Gouldiana, recounting the hopes, regrets, and anxieties of his later years. In this new installment, Gould is an aging academic who lives in New York City with his wheelchair-bound wife, who suffers from MS. All of his mental energy goes into elaborate sexual fantasies involving much younger women. A waitress at a vacation resort in Maine, the daughter of a faculty colleague, a young woman playing frisbee in the parkAin Gould's mind they all want to have sex with him. Dixon presents Gould's obsessions in extravagant run-on sentences that build into page-long paragraphs. Each chapter is essentially a self-contained short story. The overall effect is engaging and somewhat addictive. Gould is a self-centered boor, but he is also a very recognizable Everyman. Recommended for larger fiction collections. [Dixon fans should also consider Sleep, a story collection he has published this spring with Coffee House Press, ISBN 1-56689-081-0, pap. $15.95.AEd.]AEdward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch., Los Angele. -AEdward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch., Los Angeles Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. Novelist and storywriter Dixon (Sleep, p. 102, etc.) offers a big, generous, free-form fictional autobiography of his alter egohusband, father, and writer-teacher Gould Bookbinder (who first appeared in 1997's Gould). It develops in an unusual way: 30 separate chapters (arranged in apparently random order) detail both real and imaginary experiences, crowned by the book length ``Ends'' (itself containing 15 substantial sub-chapters) that considers possible ways in which this story itself might have concluded (for example, a moving sequence entitled ``The Brother'' dreams what if . . . an older brother who died young had instead grown up to become his sibling's intellectual soulmate and rival). Many chapters explore Gould's relationships with his wife Sally (a victim of multiple sclerosis) and their two daughters (``Accidents and Mishaps'' is an especially acute dramatization of parental fears). Others (such as ``Everything Goes'' and ``The Burial'') examine his feelings aboutand attempts to care forhis distant mother and scarcely known father; sexual fact and fantasy (``Popovers'' unsparingly describes his foolish infatuation with a young waitress at a Maine resort, and ``The Bel