The Review of Contemporary Fiction

I, by Stephen Dixon
reviewed by Aaron Gwyn

Stephen Dixon. I. McSweeney’s, 2002. 338 pages. $18.00.

Characteristically enough for a book published by McSweeney’s, Stephen Dixon’s fascinating new novel, I., begins on the cover. There, an “I” and an accompanying period have been cut into the cloth and cardboard, through which we see an I-shaped section of a sketch beneath: a man’s eye centering the book and with an expression one might describe as “blank.” Upon opening the novel, we discover that the sketch is of the author himself, the expression, seen now in full, replete with anxiety. Far from a mere promotional gimmick, this visual pun proves the book’s major concern, as the novel forces us to question the author lying behind the narrative I/eye—“ ‘I am not I.,’ he’s tempted to say”—the degree to which the first-person pronoun is always shorthand for something that cannot be entirely represented. The novel is broken into nineteen highly unified chapters, each of which could stand as its own story, in which readers encounter a middle-aged writer caring for his daughters and a wife with a debilitating disease. Beyond this, there is little narrative arc, but rather a series of dense, third-person monologues in which “I.” appears as an abbreviation. But the real triumph of Dixon’s work is the emotional power generated by close attention to the specificities of the protagonist’s interaction with his wife and family, as well as the meditations upon an anger “I.” struggles to understand. The author brings us in close contact with a situation that, in a lesser writer’s hands, could so easily have turned sentimental but in Dixon’s becomes a moving examination of the tensions between art and life, between private and public responsibility, between the “I” that so readily reveals itself and the “I.” that remains, even to itself, a mystery.