Robert Cohen begins his

career with a very ambitibus and im-

pressive novel. The Organ Builder is the

story of a dour young lawyer, Hesh

Freeman, who gives up his place in the

world in order to contend with the space

in himself that isolates him from others.

This giving up takes the form of a quest,

actually two quests. The first involves a

reluctant journey to the Southwest: to a

nursing home outside Santa Fe where his

alcoholic mother, now terminally ill,

resides; then to Los Alamos where his

father was employed as a nuclear physi-

cist before he disappeared twenty years

ago. The second quest is contained in the

narrative Hesh writes of his journey, not-

ably his effort to end his isolation by

allowing his imagination to inhabit other

lives. In time, voices come to him, prin-

cipally those of his parents, telling of how

the experience of developing the Atom

bomb shattered their marriage.

When we first meet him, Hesh Freeman

seemingly is the last person to get in-

volved in such mailers. He closed the

book on his parents long ago, even

changed his name from Friedmann, to

take up his own life by his own lights.

Except that neither has worked out too

well. He has a broken marriage, a

tenuous relationship with his young son,

and a future as a lawyer that he suspects

is downwardly mobile, despite the

patronage of a senior pa,rtner in his firm,

the omnivorous Charlie Goldwyn, a role

model for precisely what Hesh fears he

secretly wants to become.