Andrew: End of I. by Stephen Dixon

Stephen Dixon, to virtually no critical response whatsoever (maybe because it's his second book in the last year; 2005's Phone Rings got a full-page two-thumbs-and-a-big-toe up review in the New York Times Book Review--or maybe, let's be optimistic, reviews are forthcoming) just came out with a new novel, End of I.. It's a sequel of sorts to his 2003 sort-of-novel I., and McSweeney's is selling the two as a pair. We're publishing a chapter from Dixon's next novel, Meyer, in Avery's first edition.

I haven't received my copy of End of I. yet, but it's a safe bet that it's worth the trouble of ordering. (I haven't seen it in a bookstore, big chain or little indy, in the three weeks it's been out.) Dixon's novels have been uniformly very good at least since 1991's Frog, which I read earlier this summer. Since I can't yet rave about the new one, I'll spill a few words on Frog, without trying in any way to be comprehensive about my thoughts, and hopefully give readers who haven't read him a taste of what Dixon is like.

The following passage is both exemplary and, as a lot Dixon is, playfully self-descriptive. It's also worth noting that it comes in the middle of a chapter in which the protagonist, a fiction writer and professor named Howard Tetch (the "Frog" of the title), projects a chronologically scattershot series of scenarios before and after his imagined death. All of this is par for the course in Dixon. But to the passage, imaginary dialogue spoken by Tetch's real daughter, Eva, to her sister, Olivia:

Even your word pranks and speech patterns are like his. Repeating, explaining, digressing, questioning, requestioning, quick-switching, going over everything he said about everything and then wondering if he might have missed an insignificant detail or two, and then three or four, and probably in the process infuriating or fatiguing or infuriating because he was fatiguing everyone he's speaking to.

Many readers, even ones I like and respect, like my brother, V, find Dixon infuriating or at least fatiguing. (See a previous blog post.) I always tell these people that they haven't read enough Dixon to like him. It's precisely the "word pranks," repeating, explaining, digressing, etc.--each novel a near-infinite digression, if you'll allow me my own word prank--that makes Frog compelling--moving and hilarious in equal parts, often at the same time. Its prose attaches itself to whatever its characters' minds alight upon, and because it's so often tied to the minds of its characters, it seems to flow at the speed, and rhythm, of thought--or, because the novel is packed with extended passages of dialogue, of speech. And his characters, in thought as well as speech, tend to ramble, often about seemingly banal topics, often about their own rambling or tendency to ramble. To steal another self-descriptive from Frog, it reads like "jerky nervous diversionary chatter."

While I find this chatter immediately rewarding in its own right, what Dixon is most deft at, I think, is tossing together paragraph- and chapter-sized chunks of chatter to suprisingly strong emotional effect. ("Surprisingly" only because his prose is so funny as well.) Frog, like I., is a collage of anecdotes, stories, dreams, fantasies, and documents. The book is as thick as Ulysses (at which point I'll cut off all hints of a comparison to Joyce), but the chapters vary in length from five to a couple hundred pages. They don't come in chronological order, but they're all about Howard Tetch--his perceptions, his nightmares, his writing, his memories, but most of all his family. It almost seems as if the novel is trying to fit everything about the character it can think of into one book. He's shown in states ranging from unprovoked rage to almost over-the-top sympathy and love--and also--the chapter "Frog Blahs" comes to mind--during periods dominated by boredom or dull habit. Not only is Howard believable and sympathetic, but our sympathy for him is heightened with each new bit of information we glean from his thoughts or words, expanding in the same way the paragraphs and chapters expand, in all directions.

Another quote, from the same chapter as the first quote:

'Believe me. I can never forget him. I can get him out of my head, but the little fella always slips back in. Sometimes I think it's the same for me as it was for him with my brother. His brother. What's going on here? Oh, I see. He's in him who's in me.' 'That I don't catch.' 'Because the after's before the before.'

The after, Dixon's work, is often before the before, and the before affects the after affects the before. It's all very affecting. I recommend End of I. with neither reservation nor authority.