Salon Books | It takes a worried man

Books
Comics
Health & Body
Media
Mothers Who Think
News
People
Politics2000
Technology
- Free Software Project
Travel & Food
_______

Columnists

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Books

In defense of science fiction
Readers looking for inventive literature need to look beyond the lurid book covers.
By John Clute
[05/25/99]

Reviews
"Merde"
An investigation of shit yields gold.
By Peter Kurth
[05/25/99]

Dear Mr. Blue
Hot sex with the ex
My boyfriend's tortured by something I wrote about a long-ago, meaningless affair. How can I reassure him?
By Garrison Keillor
[05/25/99]

Book Bag
Updike in love
The author of "Rabbit, Run" picks the five greatest novels about romance.
By John Updike
[05/24/99]

Reviews
"By the Shore"
Galaxy Craze's debut novel is a hushed and tentative affair.
By Charles Taylor
[05/24/99]

Complete archives for Books

- - - - - - - - - - - -

It takes a worried man

_____________________Stephen Dixon's brilliant new novel
takes the American male beyond adolescence.

30 BY STEPHEN DIXON
HENRY HOLT, FICTION, 656 PAGES

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Roger Gathman

May 26, 1999 | Stephen Dixon has done something very difficult in his career -- he has mastered the voice of worry. This novelist has been devoted, from the very beginning, to the perfecting of one narrator, a male oversoul of the postwar American generation. His name in "Frog" was Howard Tetch. In "Interstate" he was Nathan Frey. Lately, in Dixon's last novel, "Gould," and in his newest one, "30," he's Gould Bookbinder, a writer, with two daughters, originally from New York and now teaching at some unnamed college. Sometimes Gould is plunged in grief, occasionally he is out of his head, and sometimes he is even happy, but as surely as the gnat is accompanied by its hum, Gould's internal voice is accompanied by a periphery of nagging. His relationships to women are couched in terms of this -- he can't seem to approach the topic of sex without an awful tone of begging seeping in. We've heard this voice before, in comedians like Woody Allen, but the anger in that voice -- the violence just held back -- is always defused in comedy, enlisted in the invariable, detumescent arc of the routine. Here it is the whole world, and one feels the menace of its resentments and the fierce, guilty bliss of its affections.

Dixon's reputation has suffered from the continuing affection of the literary establishment for what is taken to be the authentic American voice. It is the old hickory voice that first comes out of James Fenimore Cooper's "Leatherstocking Tales" and tells us, as D.H. Lawrence observed, that "I am alone, a stoic, a killer." Old hickory still speaks in Cormac McCarthy and Robert Stone, and after its infinite filtration through popular culture, is slyly parodied by Don Delillo and Thomas Pynchon. But this voice has no place for women, other than as scolding Aunt Pollys -- from whom our men must save their balls in some utter flight to the territories -- or as sexual oppressors, Sister Carries who leave their men sucked dry; night battles with these are the staple of Miller and Mailer. Dixon simply detours around that whole complex. Gould's relationship with his mother, and with his daughters, is as important to his existence as fucking his girlfriends; nor are any of these things subsumed to some central romance. Gould has more moods than randy. Which means that the full prism of gender relations is on display here. Dixon is an exception to the perpetual adolescence American male writers tend to foist off on their characters, and his voice sounds odd partly because it never falls into the usual tough guy strain -- not even in "Interstate," which deals with murder in a horrifically convincing fashion.

Next page | Writing that comes out in its undershirt


Search..Archives..Contact Us..Table Talk..Ad Info..Investors