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Reviewed by Steven Moore
I.
As author of two dozen books and nearly 500 short stories published over the last 25 years, Stephen Dixon may be the hardest-working man in the lit business. He has perfected a distinctive style, whereby a minor incident triggers obsessive analysis, jittery self-questioning, second thoughts and daydreamed alternatives, all conveyed in a torrent of idiomatic prose with rarely a paragraph break. His stories read quickly, belying the care with which they're constructed; in interviews, Dixon admits to revising some pages 30 or 40 times. Though billed as a novel, I. reads like any of Dixon's short-story collections, and like almost everything he's written, it is (according to his new publisher) very autobiographical. All of the stories, or chapters, concern a character who, like Dixon, teaches creative writing at a university (Johns Hopkins), is married to a handicapped woman and has two daughters. Most of the time, the narrator is called simply "he"; a few times, he tries the first-person "I" and then the initial "I.," but there's no meaningful distinction. Nor is anyone named, aside from a few peripheral characters. The stories hopscotch in time from the narrator's childhood to the present. He's a pretty ordinary guy, the narrator, and many of the stories/chapters deal with ordinary events. In one, he apologizes repeatedly to one of his daughters for always losing his temper. In another, he attempts to correct his forgetfulness with mnemonic tricks. Others recall dates he had with women before he met his wife. There's a Seinfeldian quality to some, with a minor incident being obsessed over to the point of absurdity: His apologies to his daughter, for example, are extrapolated into the future when he imagines himself apologizing to her hypothetical son. What makes these ordinary incidents extraordinary -- and what has earned Dixon so many awards and the attention of critics -- is the metafictional techniques he deploys so effortlessly. Like a magician explaining his trick as he performs it, Dixon lets the reader overhear his thinking process as he constructs these stories: sorting out correct details from misremembered ones, finding the right vocabulary, wondering if he should cut certain passages, and so on. In the opening chapter, he gets halfway through a story before admitting the events didn't really happen that way, then gives a presumably accurate account. In the most extreme example -- the concluding, novella-length "Again" -- the narrator begins with multiple versions of how he met his wife, each slightly different. It reads like the literary equivalent of a cubist painting or, better yet, like one of Philip Glass's early, hour-long compositions, which repeat basic figures with algorithmic variations. About halfway through, the narrator settles into a straightforward narrative, and this account of a 42-year-old man courting a younger woman confined to a wheelchair might just break your heart. Like an improv critic who takes a suggestion from the audience and runs with it, Dixon usually starts with a promising opening line to see where it takes him. Sometimes it goes well, other times, as he'll confess to the reader, it goes nowhere. The difference between Dixon and a more mainstream writer is that he publishes his "failures," which nonetheless succeed at showing the writer's mind at work and deepening the characterization of his narrator. Whether considered as another short-story collection or as a novel -- all of the stories do indeed add up to a well-rounded picture and history of "he"/"I"/"I." -- Dixon's latest book accurately captures the hectic, one-damn-thing-after-another quality of modern life. Dixon is the polar opposite of the late William Gaddis -- who seems to be the model for a character in one story, snubbing the narrator on several occasions -- but, like Gaddis, he paces his events at breakneck speed and can ride herd on a stampede of language that is always, but never quite, threatening to go out of control. And he's much easier than Gaddis; reading his stories is like eating potato chips. Despite their metafictional qualities and possible parallels with cubist art or minimalist music, these fictions stick to basic emotions and real-life situations: They take place in crowded apartments and suburban houses, not in ivory towers. Highly personal, in a few cases embarrassingly intimate, I. is artfully artless, honest and true. Consumer advisory: Because of the publisher's benighted anti-corporate stance, McSweeney's Books are available only in selected independent bookstores and on the company Web site (www.mcsweeneys.net). Dixon's books sell poorly enough without being saddled with this additional burden, so interested readers will need to make a special effort to procure a copy. I. is worth it. € - - - -
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