30
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. With30, 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 thenovel 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 theBattleship Potemkinscenario, 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