True Love by Herbert Gold. Arbor House. 1982. 214pp. $14.25.

Author. Herbert Gold, a native of Cleveland, has made southern California his home for the past several years. Before that he lived in places as different as Biafara and Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he taught at Harvard. He is a novelist, short-story writer, and essayist (this is his 19th book) who has won numerous awards for his work.

The protagonist of this novel, Watkins (that is his first name and the only one we learn), two-times-divorced and now single, is an adjunct professor and part-time practitioner of law in Davis, California. At the beginning of the story his twice-a-week lover, Bethany Andrews, decides he is getting too serious about her and walks out of his life to devote all her time to her prosperous dentist husband, her three children, and her tennis. But in preparation for her departure she puts a blind advertisement in the classified section of the newspaper: "BAY AREA PROF, midforties, div., straight, no physical defects, high IQ . . . ." and before she goes she gives him a manila folder (labeled "gum diseases today") containing the answers she has received, neatly arranged in what she considers their order of suitability for him.

In stunned acquiescence he arranges meetings with the first few women Bethany has listed, and he has some horrific comic adventures. He tries a men's encounter group that is dominated by an aggressive, aging hippie who speaks "sixties jive" as the group careers toward homosexuality. Sometimes he parks near the tennis courts and watches Bethany play; at other times he goes out of his way to avoid the tennis courts when she is playing there.

Gold examines, more lightheartedly than in some of his recent books, the feelings of men and women toward each other. The jacket photo shows a sad smile on his face; that smile permeates the book. But at the same time he enjoys satirizing encounter groups, lonely-hearts ads, and how people behave generally. A member of the male encounter group "was now happily, he announced resentfully, back with his wife." A newspaper advertisement reads, "Warm, impetuous, feminist woman with a passion for electronics, would like to meet . . . ." One of the women on Watkins' list, in the midst of an intimate love scene, gazes up at him from the carpet of her apartment: "Suddenly she was happily in love with someone, a person who was beautiful, good, wonderful - herself."

The author has a keen ear for the way people talk. One person mentions "pharmacuticles." Another speaks of "total soul interface." The words help sketch their characters. Gold is master of the neat phrase: a room "was furnished in Huckleberry Farouk style," and in a more threatening situation, "The air was clear and silvery in there, like a closet full of knives."

This story arrives at no startling new conclusions about male-female relationships, probably because there are none to arrive at. But it develops many of the problems. Above all, it does so in a way that keeps the reader chuckling even as some of the bleaker truths are revealed.

Reviewer: James P. Barry