In eight illustrated books, elegantly held together in a single beribboned case, McSweeney's Issue 28 explores the state of the fable. For the next two days, it's $5 off. - - - - |
- - - - Copyright 1990 Studies in Short Fiction (Newberry College)
- - - - Title: Reviews.
- - - - REVIEWS LOVE AND WILL, by Stephen Dixon. British American Publishing: New York, 1989.193 pp. $17.95. Having published four novels and seven short story collections since 1976, Stephen Dixon is quickly emerging as one of America's most prolific and versatile writers. In his collection Love and Will, Dixon once again explores the familiar but always disturbing landscape of his previous collections. From the first story to the last, Dixon submerges us in an urban world of desperate motion and brutal coincidence, a futile space of bloodied sidewalks where men and women attempt to salvage meaningful futures from the wreckage of their shattered and often violent lives. More than half of the twenty stories collected here are brief tales of no more than five to ten pages, a length with which Dixon seems quite comfortable. These shorter tales are marked by a frenzied pace, both in language and in plot, and, in their challenging swiftness, represent Dixon at his idiosyncratic best. When he creates more extended fictions, such as "Love and Will," "Dog Days," or "The Village," we may miss the pacing of the shorter tales, but we are rewarded by more fully developed portraits of his protagonists. Both the long and the short tales manifest Dixon's unique vision of twentieth-century urban life, a vision which, I suspect, is influenced less by any American tradition than by the urban fables of Franz Kafka. In many of these stories, Dixon, like Kafka, seeks out the insignificant man who, because of some macabre coincidence or shattered relationship, finds himself locked in a frustratingly absurd situation. Like the main character in "Windows," a divorced man turned Peeping Tom who yearns for the past love of his wife and daughter, Dixon's protagonists repeatedly ask themselves the exasperating question, "What went wrong?" All too often the answer to this question is yet another, more anxious question: "Why did it have to go wrong?" If Dixon offers us any answer to these questions, it is the very Kafkaesque conclusion that things go wrong because they can, that rape, kidnapping, paralysis, and painful divorce are like death--they happen to us not because of anything we do, but simply because we are. The existential concerns of this collection are accompanied by Dixon's more literary, metafictional interests. In "The Painter," for example, we are offered endlessly revised versions of a painter's death. The story begins, "So the great painter dies." What follows is a series of paragraphs, almost all of which begin with "No," in which the narrator imagines and reimagines, posits and refutes, each version of the painter's final moments. In "Magna . . . Reading," the protagonist is writing a story about how his wife reads his stories. At the very moment he is composing this story, his wife is downstairs reading a manuscript of his stories. He intends to finish this story he is writing about his wife reading his stories before his wife can finish reading the stories she is at that very moment still reading. In "The Cove," a writer tries to construct a meeting between two men on a beach. Every time he creates a situation, he takes it apart, telling himself to "Go back again" because it is "still all wrong." These "writerly" metafictions are akin to the Kafkaesque urban fables because in each type of story Dixon is focused on desperation. Whether writers or lovers, Dixon's protagonists want desperately to go back again and to revise their world because what they are writing or what they are living seems so very wrong. The marvel of Dixon's latest collection is that the execution of this desperate message needs no revision. It all seems so very right. - - - - By CHRISTOPHER METRESS, Wake Forest University - - - -
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