- - - - Copyright 1995 Virginia Quarterly Review
- - - - Title: Notes on current books: Fiction.
- - - - NOTES ON CURRENT BOOKS: FICTION
Stephen Dixon is a gifted short story writer, an innovator and craftsman of the first rank. No other writer has done more to energize the form in decades. His stories derive their power from a dazzling sense of immediacy, a blitz of words that leave the reader breathless and that resonate long after the last page. His new novel, interstate, raises interesting questions about how well his talent translates to a longer medium. It is full of the same jangling detail and appealingly awkward dialogue. Dixon begins with random violence, a father and his daughters are shot at on the interstate by a madman and one of the daughters is killed. "He screams in pain, glass in his head and a bullet through his hand, yells 'Girls, you all right?' for there's screaming from in back but only one of them, and his oldest daughter says 'Daddy, Julie's not moving, Daddy, she's bleeding, Daddy, I don't see her breathing, I think she's dead.'" The scene glows but as the novel progresses, following the father's obsession with finding the killers and then the father's own death in a diner robbery and his living daughter's reaction, the pacing and technique become serious issues. Reading interstate is something like watching a 24-hour fireworks display. The beauty of the showering sparks wears off after a while. It's still present, just as it was in the first explosion or on the very first page, but the reader becomes numb to it. interstate is a grand, exhausting novel, amply exploring the depths of love and loss but its impact is diminished by the density of Dixon's prose, a talent better suited to the short form. Dixon, however, deserves to be read. His stories are pure and perfect gems.
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