December 31st, 2010 / 12:06 am
Random

The What-If Game

One of Stephen Dixon’s favorite strategies is telling the same story repeatedly, but changing a variable in the cause-and-effect chain with each telling — having fate deal a slightly different event, for example, or causing a key agent to make a different choice — and then exploring how time rings the changes differently in the lives of the characters. Sometimes we seem to be reading a study in worry — what will happen to me and the people I love if I don’t rightly account for all the possible permutations of even the smallest choices I make? — and sometimes we seem to be reading a study in the futility of trying to fight the forces of fate, since maybe there’s no accounting for the consequences of our choices as they play out along the cause-and-effect chain when so many things are so far beyond our control. Agency is everything and/or there is no agency.

The most focused of Dixon’s fictions that employ this strategy can be found in his novel Interstate (which was a National Book Award Finalist in 1995, and yet is now, sadly, out of print, and ripe for reprinting by an outfit like Dalkey Archive Press or New York Review Books — whichever wises up first.) Interstate tells the same story eight times. A guy is driving a car on the interstate, his two daughters with him, and some rough-looking guys in another car show a gun. In each of the tellings, he does something different, or the guys in the other car do something different, in response to the scenario. The consequences might extend only into the next few minutes, or the moment might become the dividing line between one kind of life and another. Having established the one rigid formal constraint — each story will begin in this moment, and there will be eight explorations of possible alternative outcomes — Dixon frees himself to explore what follows very freely with regard to how time is used, how characters are constructed, how the telling will privilege or balance scene or exposition, or even how point of view will be constructed with relation to pronouns (Chapter Six is rendered in second person.) The one unifying thread, besides the inciting incident and the unity the recursion offers, is what we might call the voice of Stephen Dixon, which, although it is mostly given from inside the protagonist’s point of view (we’re parsing the protagonist’s needs, wants, desires, thoughts, memories, and motivations, and seeing the world through the protagonist’s eyes), is still concurrently present — we have the characteristic Dixonian hyper-analytic articulation of things, the pages-long paragraphs, the strange accordioning of time, and, most of all, the structure-making puppeteer pulling the strings at all times. The psychological realism here is in service of almost didactic ends — the reader is being invited to ask a series of questions about the nature of life, the nature of fate, the nature of human agency, the ways in which human relationships are dependent upon circumstance. The ultimate end of the book, in other words, is not verisimilitude, but verisimilitude (plus structural repetition) is the means that gets us to that end. It is an appealing strategy, not least because Dixon is skillful enough realist to make us forget, eight times in a row, that we’re not in the realm of strict realism.

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9 Comments

  1. stefan michael

      A few minutes ago, I was upstairs (treadmill, ugh) and happen to bring down that same copy (from the photo) of Interstate, which I read many years ago in rapt amazement as with almost everything of Dixon’s. I’m reading “Meyer”, which is somehow about me and every thought I’ve ever had deconstructed and put into faintly familiar dream territory. I will never again think of a Meyer lemon or my friend the noted artist Eric Meyer or Meyers’s Rum the same way, which is to say that I’ve never really thought about any of those in any particular way or even at all, or rarely.

  2. Dsyhdhkj

      madeshopping.com

  3. Julianmarcel

      Stephen Dixon is one of a few living authors that I will always purchase their new books. FROG is still the novel I love the most, and Dixon’s style of rearrangement has always been wonderful to fall into. Sometimes his romantic and emotional characterization gets too maudlin, however those come in small doses and Dixon has the knack of creating characters that need so much for life to work, and in the end I always feel drawn to them.

  4. deadgod

      the forces of face

      re-arrangements:

      sag/intent

      squint/pop

      purse/gape

      smiley/frownie

      before conception / after decomposition

  5. Kyle Minor

      “forces of fate” — typo fixed. But I might start putting them in on purpose to give you an excuse to riff.

  6. Dawn.

      Thanks for the excellent introduction to Dixon’s work, Kyle. I will be reading Interstate sometime soon.

      I play that what-if game in my head almost constantly. Sounds like Dixon knew how to put that hyper-anxious trait to work.

  7. Andy Linkner

      FROG is, possibly, my all time favorite novel. Dixon was the best American fiction writer of the 90’s, IMO.

  8. Gjn7khjfgjhgdj

      madeshopping.com

  9. Yhyhg

      love-shopping.org