SHE TOOK MY ARM AS IF SHE LOVED ME.<i> By Herbert Gold</i> .<i> St. Martin’s Press: 247 pp., $21.95</i>

The publication of Herbert Gold’s 28th book offers an opportunity to trace the trajectory of one of the more admirable yet oddly unsung careers in American letters. Why this should be so is revealing perhaps not only of the particular direction that Gold’s writing has taken but also of the life he has lived and the way that life has shaped his fiction.

I first met Gold about 40 years ago in New York City. It seemed to me then that he had come to Manhattan, as had I, because that was where the action was, where American culture was being defined. Most important, publishing was centered there. It was where the literary agents and the editors and writers brushed against one another at parties and at long, alcoholic editorial lunches and where the models and magazines popularized the latest trend in art and fashion and style.

He had secured his literary credentials in New York by the late 1950s, when several of his best stories began appearing in the Hudson Review, one of the foremost literary journals of the day. The review ran Gold’s story “The Heart of the Artichoke” in 1957, which depicted with considerable poignancy the painful struggle of a Cleveland boy separating from his Jewish immigrant father so that he could belong, could become American just like the others in his school and neighborhood. Then, a few years later, Hudson’s editors published his corrosive story, “Love and Like,” a long, harsh narrative about a failed marriage told in almost documentary detail. It was no secret that Gold was divorced, bitterly so, that he had had two young daughters now living with their mother in Detroit and that the story was a rendering by him, acidly, of that conflict. But the fiction had not proved cathartic; his anger still felt raw.

These stories, plus others that had appeared in Atlantic, Antioch Review, Commentary and Discovery, made him very much a part of what might be called New York’s literary set. James Laughlin, New Directions’ publisher, asked him for five stories for a book called “Fifteen by Three.” It augured well for his future, an authenticating gesture, though it brought little by way of income.

But then, almost like a scene in a Horatio Alger novel, Hugh Hefner and Playboy magazine stepped into Gold’s life. Attracted by his stories about failed love affairs and the pursuit of women, Playboy’s editors dangled a contract that offered (then) relatively lavish payments for his stories, along with a retainer for first look at everything he wrote. Almost overnight, he leaped from the hermetic world of the little magazine writer to a larger stage. He suddenly was reaching a broader audience. And he had some money, though not what anyone would call a vast sum.

During this shift from the little magazines, his writing changed as well. Not better or worse; just a different tone. Instead of tapping directly into memories and experiences, sifting through his feelings about them, he began to write fiction that read more like social commentary. He adopted a playful, occasionally mocking, stance toward the men and women who began to appear in his stories and novels.

Perhaps it had less to do with Playboy magazine and was more connected to the turn his life was taking. There were faster, racier parties and a larger circle of social and socialite acquaintances. Presumably to escape the distractions of the cultural scene, the jockeying for literary position, the “need to be with it,” not to mention the high cost of living in New York, he departed in the early 1960s for the smaller scale and more self-contained world of San Francisco, a city that would become a center for his fiction (and nonfiction) and where, for more than 35 years, he would make a new life for himself.

In San Francisco, he soon was recognized as one of California’s leading fiction writers. He also remarried and started a second family. But then, that marriage failed, and the combat between men and women once again began to mark his fiction.

Earlier, in the flush of his new life in San Francisco, he had published “Fathers,” a warm, affectionate novel-cum-memoir about his father, which to this day remains one of my favorite books. He returned to the theme of family and generations--the immigrant making his and her way in America--15 years later with “Family,” a novel and memoir that paid homage, this time, to his mother.

But between these nostalgic and truly felt love songs to his past were the accounts still to be settled, the laying-out of affairs gone awry, the recollections of love and jealousy and marriage that always ended in sorrow. His life continued to serve as raw material, and his fiction became the stage on which he dramatized and worked out its meanings.

He was superb at recording the rise and terrible fall within a marriage, particularly that early play of movement between lovers just before things begin to sour. And he seemed to have memorized all the precise feelings, the fear of abandonment, the sadness over the loss of so much personal history, the reluctance to let go.

He had touched on this earlier in his farewell-to-New York novel, “Salt,” in 1963. But now, it was fresh again and different. Of course, he was older, a man approaching 50. There were the stories in “Stories of Misbegotten Love” and the novel, “A Girl of Forty,” both published in 1986. And the earlier almost classic case study, “He/She,” published in 1980, a portrait of a disintegrating marriage set in San Francisco, which still dazzles me. It is a painful and personal account of two people locked together, one clinging to the marriage, the other desperately trying to leave.

Now in his 18th novel, “She Took My Arm as if She Loved Me,” Gold has come back once more to the themes of love and marriage and freedom that were present in “He/She” and, so long ago, in “Love and Like.” This time, however, the tone is bittersweet and harbors a feeling of letting go, of Gold saying farewell to his former wife and to a love that finally is over, remembered with affection and understanding as well as grief.

This new work is actually driven by two narratives that are characteristic of Gold’s fiction. The first, a profile of a couple whose marriage is ending, plays to his strength. Almost like a therapist starting the analytic process, he peels away one layer at a time. Each recognition by wife or husband produces a violent reaction and a changed balance between the two.

The wife--Priscilla, turning into her 30s, married with one child and no career--realizes suddenly that by embracing family life, she has denied herself a range of option and possibilities that could set her free. What form these experiences will take is not yet clear to her. Lovers, most certainly. A career, perhaps but perhaps not. But what’s out there is freedom and an identity she can call her own, perhaps for the first time. Besides, she is not at all sure she likes her husband. Loves him, perhaps but does not like him. Or is it that she likes him but does not love him? Either way, she is determined to end the marriage.

The husband, Dan, loves his wife and will not let go. He is without control, without shame and, finally, without hope. What will save him, but only in part, is to recognize the new person his wife has become and sadly let her find her own way without him. It is all close up, intimate, the writer undefended and exposed.

The novel’s second and subordinate strand is less successful. Dan is a private investigator, offered to us as street-wise, complete with his own private moral code. There is some business with a detective who is his friend and protector and a plot line that has to do with accepting or rejecting a contract from a shady drug dealer. Much of this seems to be a pastiche of details observed by the writer on trips to the Tenderloin and other seedy corners of San Francisco. It is a plot wholly imagined but never felt. Indeed, when Gold strays from portraits of family life or the pursuit of love and its dissolution, there is a tendency to show us a character who is experienced and hip but not fully realized. Often that character takes on the persona of Gold in disguise, passing himself off as a stockbroker (“Salt”) or a school principal (“A Girl Over Forty”) or even, as here, a private investigator.

Gold has been writing for more than 45 years now and in that time has produced more than two dozen books and more essays and articles than I could easily track down. He seems to me to be a man of gravitas. He has pursued a literary vocation, seeking with each story or novel to make sense of his life and, by extension, all of our lives. He is to be admired and honored.