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- - - - Copyright Knowledge DeZigns, Inc. 2002
- - - - I.: The First Novel in a New Stephen Dixon Trilogy Reviewed by Alan Tinkler I.
Stephen Dixon is a silent master of prose. While other writers seem to garner fame and fortune, Dixon plods along, writing a stunning array of books and gaining surprisingly little notoriety. In his most recent novel, I, published by McSweeney's Books, Dixon again demonstrates that he is a master prose stylist as well as a formal genius. I. is not a collection of stories, even as the table of contents delineates a series of titles, as though a short story collection. I. is a novel of wonderful, non-linear complexity. Even the move of naming the protagonist I. is rather extraordinary and surprisingly effective. While Dixon distances himself from the label meta-fiction, this move of melding the third person and the first person generates nice tension throughout the novel; it is a tension that augments the narrative. In the first chapter, Paris, the strategy for the novel is given. After starting the story in one direction (the protagonist is sitting alone in an expensive French restaurant and orders a glass of wine for a woman across the room who then joins him after she reciprocates the exchange by buying him a glass), the story shifts: "What actually happened was that he lived in the hotel for a year and never went to the restaurant; just could never afford it." It is the nature of dreams and memories to muddle. As the rubric for the novel expands, the reader becomes more and more convinced by the accuracy of the inconsistencies. And, this is why the work is a novel rather than a collection of short stories. Like dreams and memories, the chapters are non-linear. Like memories and dreams, the chapters coalesce, providing the reader with a unified narrative-the past, the present, the future as one. I has a wife, who is wheelchair bound, and two children, both daughters. The last chapter, Again, which is also the longest chapter, narrates the courtship between I. and his wife. The tenderness of the courtship is made even more compelling since the reader has already been exposed to other vignettes of their life together. In The Switch, the narrator puts I. in a wheelchair and makes his wife the caretaker. By affecting this role reversal, both I. and his wife are able to expose their respective frustrations by way of an interesting and effective double-voicing. With the reversal in place, she says: "Believe me, what you see as anger and roughness is often the only way I can get the adrenaline going enough to have the strength to move and lift you." The exchange wouldn't be complete without her taking time to write: "Now she's in the kitchen doing her own work on the small typewriter table by the window....He's in the next room and feels he has to pee and calls out for her. Door's closed, she can't hear him or is pretending not to so she can finish the line she's writing." The most compelling quality of the chapter, however, is that The Switch avoids self-eulogy. The fact that I is burdened by his wife's illness does not make him a martyr; it simply makes him human. The protagonist, not surprisingly, is not solely defined by his wife or her illness. In the chapter titled The Parade, I recounts childhood memories of the Macy's Thanksgiving day parade, where the protagonist as a child sees "Santa standing beside his sled and smoking a cigarette," and hopes "one would fly away." After all, no childhood is complete until the balloon flies away. Even as Dixon suggests that the novel is not meta-fictional, there are moments where he places acute attention on the constructiveness of fiction. In Author, a chapter where I remembers running into an author that bears an imprecise similarity to William Gaddis, the protagonist considers memory triggers: "Something about memory, he thinks, and how events just seem to pop back from some buried spot when the mind's been triggered by something like the obituary of someone you knew or were acquainted with in some way, and also about being a young writer." As the chapter progresses, I considers whether or not he should write a short story about the author, which is to some observers meta-fictional. While it isn't relevant whether or not the fictional writer is in fact Gaddis, the important aspect when considering Dixon's writing is that Dixon does use autobiographical elements in his fiction, yet the piece is always unabashedly fiction. He is not writing autobiography, even though he does have a wife who is confined to a wheelchair and two daughters. The problem with viewing his work as autobiographical is one of reception. If the reader presupposes that a piece is autobiographical, the reader risks losing perspective on the creative nature of the enterprise. In an interview on the McSweeney's website, Dixon says, regarding which works he remembers most fondly: "The ones that are my favorites are the ones where I felt I made a breakthrough in my fiction, when I did something that I had never done." Stephen Dixon is a consummate prose writer, acutely concerned with style and form. To reduce his works to their autobiographical elements is reductive and destructive. I look forward to reading the second and third novels in the trilogy, titled Two and Three, respectively. - - - -
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