Love and Will

November 1, 1989
Innovative novelist and short story writer Dixon ( Fall & Rise ; Garbage ) displays a distinctive voice in these 20 well-crafted tales. Highly charged, insistent, often expressing themselves in gritty urban vernacular, his narrators emerge as ironic, sensitive, self-deprecating losers and loners. In the title story, Will thinks of his hopeless love for Dana, paces his apartment, tends his dying father. A composer in ``Buddy'' strolls through Manhattan meeting friends, but his sexual encounter with an opera singer is brief and alienating. Venturing on Broadway, Lewis in ``Dog Days'' is bitten by the possibly rabid pet of a transvestite. Incidents spill over into absurdist nightmares. The narrator of ``In Time'' rushes to aid a screaming woman, only to fall for eight years into the enslaving clutches of two weird sisters. ``Magna . . . Reading'' deals with the fatigue of a resisting reader who balks at the output of a prolix writer friend. Despite his experiments in style, Dixon remains rooted in daily reality, his narratives combining a dark humor with a surreal vision of the world.

December 1, 1989
In each of the stories in this collection, Dixon manages to intrigue, entertain, and enlighten. He intrigues us with his offbeat approach, entertains us with his fearless yet sophisticated wit, and enlightens us by exposing his subject matter to an unblinking scrutiny. "Arrangements" follows a couple from their first meeting, through courtship, marriage, child-rearing, and old age, in seven pages. "Last" describes the creation of a novel as a sexual act with obstetric clarity. In "Grace Calls," a mysterious woman pulls the narrator into an ever-deepening nightmare. "Guests" has the reader nervously waiting for an overly attentive host to share some terribly important news. Dixon's mastery of the short story form, which he threatens at times to reinvent, is evident. Stylistically, a few of these stories work like prose-poems in the compressed power of their language. Wonderful for reading aloud.-- Francis Poole, Kentucky Wesleyan Coll., Owensboro

Copyright 1989 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.