Dreaming by Herbert Gold. Donald I. Fine, Inc., 1988. $17.95.

Herbert Gold never stops shaking his head over those healthy, self-indulgent Californians who surround him where he lives out in San Francisco. Dreaming is yet another depiction of that old Me generation - West Coast style - that he clucked about in A Girl at Forty. The "tired blonde" who starred in his last book makes a brief appearance in this one in bed with the protagonist.

Hutch Montberg in many ways is the tired blonde's male counterpart. He's empty, aimless, dreaming the fools' dreams that Californians dream in Herbert Gold novels. Hutch is all accoutrements. He's got everything it takes to be a success except success. In the spirit of the Norman Vincent Peale philosophy of positive thinking, Hutch even has the mindset for success. He goes with the flow when he's not going for the burn. He runs, he's into Zen. He says "no sweat" a lot. He beds tired blondes and tools around in his BMW offering people investment "opportunities" that no one but Hutch believes in.

To his adolescent niece, Hutch is all glamour. He cultivates her admiration and enjoys the cruel contrast between his sleek borrowed self and the hard-scrabble existence of her parents. His kid brother, Dan, drives a cab and tries painfully, hopelessly to excrete the great novel he's been laboring over for years. He's everything Hutch is not - a little pudgy, burdened with responsibility, struggling daily with insufficient funds. Where Dan's life is gray, Hutch's is golden. But like his daughter, Trish, Dan is a little under the spell of his big brother. So when Hutch finally can no longer keep his juggled dreams up in the air and his last great opportunity becomes a black hole, Hutch's redemption may come at the cost of Dan's dreams. The trouble is, Gold has it all his own way with these characters. Hutch, who carries most of the book, staggers on his skinny runner's shanks under the weight. He's not a person, only a parody. No matter how much the reader hopes that something about Hutch will be genuine enough to elicit feeling or involvement, Hutch is, after all, an empty vessel. That's what Gold made him. He likes, he even loves, but his emotions have no currency. They just swim around in his limpid ego until fate pulls the plug and everyone around him gets sucked down the drain.

When it comes to lampooning that materialistic, Perrier-drinking California society that Midwesterners love to hate, but don't really believe in, Gold is a past master. He gets the nuances right. But when it comes to trying to inject pathos and credibility into a lampoon - well, maybe that's just dreaming.

Reviewer: At the time of this review, Emily Foster was a staff writer for Columbus Monthly and a veteran contributor to Ohioana Quarterly.