Amazon.com Review
Over the course of a long career, Stephen Dixon has never been bitten by the minimalist bug, or even lightly grazed by it. His books tend toward the big-boned and expansive, and his prose--with its steamroller pacing and superabundance of sensual detail--is maximal down to the last comma. With
30, however, the author may have exceeded even his own record for literary megatonnage. Weighing in at 672 pages, this novel seems at least twice that long: at times the dense, unparagraphed pages feel like a challenge to the reader's attention span and eyesight. Still, Dixon can't be faulted for his ambition, which is to capture his protagonist's experience with a kind of hair-trigger fidelity. Gould Bookbinder (who first appeared in the
novel of the same name) is to be a late 20th-century Everyman, deluged with more facts and feelings than he can possibly handle.
Take this passage, in which Gould is merely standing on a Manhattan street corner with a toddler:
He's waiting for the light to change on Amsterdam, cars roaring north past him, on his way to see his mother, got off the bus on Broadway, unfolded the stroller, and strapped Fanny in; now she's sleeping peacefully, head to one side, hair spilled over her face and both hands holding a shaggy stuffed animal, when a sudden breeze moves the stroller a little and he grabs the right cane-shaped handle with one hand and then a terrific wind and he's about to grab the other handle when the stroller's lifted a few inches off the ground and he lunges at it and misses and it's blown into the avenue and lands on its wheels a few feet away....
Never fear: despite the
Battleship Potemkin scenario, Gould quickly yanks the stroller back to safety. But the paragraph, which includes several hundred more words in this vein, encapsulates both the author's strengths (meticulous tabulation of human life) and weaknesses (dull and indiscriminate tabulation of human life). Elsewhere the hero reminisces, sleeps around, writes, and pursues a belly dancer on a cruise ship. Dixon fans will treasure his excellent adventures, which are ingeniously apportioned into 30 segments. Doubters, however, may find a little too much fool's Gould for their taste.
--William Davies
From Publishers Weekly
Dixon's fiction never stops. Not only does he write lots of it (30 being his 20th book; see review of Sleep, Forecasts, Feb. 1); not only are his memorable protagonists nonstop worriers or talkers; not only do his sentences, paragraphs, dialogues and monologues spread out (a typical paragraph lasts two pages)Abut his insights into motive, emotion, interaction, speech and thought are as prodigious as his output. Reading Dixon's fiction amounts to following him as far into his characters' thoughts as he can go. 30 takes its name from its 30 "episodes," all surrounding Dixon's alter ego, Gould Bookbinder, like Dixon a New York writer with two daughters, who teaches at a college in Baltimore. Gould's wife, Sally, has MS; she and Gould's mother both use wheelchairs. The stories interweave episodes from Gould's earliest childhood ("The Dinner Table") to his divorce ("The First Woman"). As in Dixon's best-known novel, Frog, small or banal incidents take up pages of thoughts and dialogue and recollection: the effect is stroboscopic, a reel of minutiae that turns ordinary days into intricate, compulsive rituals. Perhaps the funniest episode is "The Burial," in which Gould tries to steal a book of Emily Dickinson's poetry from a public library to read at his mother's funeral. Other stories depart from realism: "The Miracle" cures Sally's disability, and "Ends" presents several handfuls of incompatible ways to end the novel (in several, Gould dies). Dixon's prose can be brilliantly accurate, or draining, or excruciating, or all three. Sometimes the novel feels vertiginously dense, like a three-hour movie consisting solely of closeups. At other times it's simply more demanding, and more rewarding, than ordinary, ordinarily plotted, novels. Dixon owes Joyce a lot, and it's entirely appropriate that the end of "Ends" invokes the Molly Bloom episode in Ulysses; Dixon's intentions are certainly on that scale. (May) FYI: Two of Dixon's previous novels, Interstate (1995) and Frog (1991), were finalists for the National Book Award.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
