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It seems pointless to belabor the specifics of Dixon's meta-fictional craftsmanship, (a species of look-at-me writing that has, one hopes, nearly run its course) because his book is that rare case in which such extra-literary display plucks a distant third banjo to the story itself. To be sure, this work is all story, and the rest, as they say, is simply gravy. Steeped within the bathos of this familial dysfunction, the reader may not even realize the spectacular pyrotechnic slight of hand achieved through Dixon's varied approaches to a singular plot development. The basic plot elements, slowly uncovered through 19 stand-alone shorts that comprise the novel, may insufficiently be reduced to the following: Selfish but loving father fumbles his way through the care taking of a terminally ill wife. But such is Dixon's restraint that this situation is first introduced with a subtle point of view shift, in which the protagonist (simply known as "I." throughout) imagines the particularly graphic progression of his wife's failing health as if it were his own. Because this story, as much of the rest of the book, takes place in the narrator's imagination, Dixon reveals the machinations of his character's inner lives in ways that simply could not be achieved otherwise. The result here is stunning, not in the revelatory details of the illness, but in the brutal frankness with which the sympathetic, yet all-too human I. deals with his collapsing life. Elsewhere in the book, the progression of time is manipulated skillfully, as each story progresses back and forth through I.'s remembrance of things past, covering and recovering, and then checking one more time to be sure he has got his story right. Literary pretension aside, this book is capable of breaking your heart like a resolved mathematical proof or breathtaking mountain climb, and you may not be able to resist reading it in small chunks. That is if one is unafraid of suffering a pinch too much self-awareness here and there, particularly in "Think," a story that reads as the inner thoughts of the writer/character/narrator rolled into one. But to quibble with the indulgences of such an accomplished and dizzyingly brilliant writer (25 books published and nearly 500 stories) would be an unnecessary stint in giant-slaying. Mcsweeney's Books seems to have finally hit its stride, with this, its most accomplished work to date. - - - -
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