Interstate: A Novel - Hardcover

Dixon, Stephen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805026541 ISBN 13: 9780805026542

Publisher: Henry Holt & Co, 1995

Synopsis

In the author's first novel since Frog, a nominee for the National Book Award, a father mentally replays, in eight variations, the shooting of his daughters on an interstate highway. 15,000 first printing. $12,500 ad/promo.

About this title

About the Author

Stephen Dixon teaches at Johns Hopkins University.

Reviews

Dixon's 1991 novel, Frog, earned him NBA and PEN/Faulkner nominations. His latest, Interstate, is equally distinctive and imaginative in portraying human peculiarities and the search for order in the seemingly irrational and meaningless contemporary American universe. The novel brilliantly explores the alterations of memory, trauma and guilt in parents whose children have been casualties of violence. Like all of Dixon's work, it is a demanding read; the edgy, insistent, run-on dialogue, in particular, requires focused attention. The story is told eight times. While the inciting incident remains the same, with each retelling, new dimensions are added to or subtracted from the plot and characters. The question Dixon raises is what really haunts us: What would you do if the unthinkable happened? The critical event is this: a father is driving home on the highway with his little girls in the back seat; some men in a minivan drive up alongside and shoot through the window, killing one of the girls. In offering different scenarios from this point on, Dixon challenges the reader to leap imaginatively into the experience. One father risks his marriage, his relationship with his remaining child and his freedom to find the killer. Another makes his dead child's memory into a religion, praying the hospital will tell him "she's saved," although he knows she's dead. With each variation Dixon implicitly asks: How can you be sure the incident happened the way you remember, or the way you've been told? Reading Interstate is like being a passenger in a car speeding along the highway of the mind, swerving in and out of what is real and imagined, on the edge of losing control yet not losing it, because the driver knows what he's doing. With characteristic directness, Dixon's crisis-mode narrative runs together in one seemingly jumbled, breathless rush, with evocative thoughts causing memories to surface not just in the minds of the narrators but in the reader's mind as well. Jarringly perceptive and darkly compelling, this novel will confirm Dixon as a writer of stature. Author tour.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Author of 16 works of fiction, recipient of NEA and Guggenheim fellowships, and nominee for NBA and PEN/ Faulkner awards, Dixon should be well known. He is one of America's most prolific writers but remains relatively obscure. Interstate could change that because it is stunning fiction that both illuminates and distorts the present by focusing on random violence as it enters the life of a middle-class family. Leaving his wife at her parents', Nathan Frey drives home from New York City on the interstate with his two young daughters in the backseat. They are suddenly followed, approached, and shot at by two suspicious travelers. His younger daughter is fatally wounded. Retold through eight chapters, the highway incident continually reveals new perspectives that ask: What is true? What can be remembered? What is imagined? How do we associate events, images, and sensations? What should our response be? Do we have any power to protect those we love? This novel experiments with form, creating mental wanderings and nonlinear retellings that are slightly reminiscent of The Sound and the Fury. Dixon incorporates frantic stream of consciousness, realistic dialogue, first-and third-person narrative, and journalistic reporting. The book is hyperactive and richly complex, a meditation on violence--its repercussions, our fears, our safety attempts, self-denial, and even "eye for an eye" responses. Profound and cutting edge, a timely reminder of our world, and a skillful example of fiction's potential. Janet St. John

Now here's a novel idea: a work in which each of eight chapters consists entirely of a single long paragraph. But there's a method to Dixon's seeming stylistic madness, and this follow-up to his acclaimed Frog (a finalist for both the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner award; reviewed in LJ 1/92) is in fact a case of form following function. The eight narratives are alternative replays of a terrible, defining moment that transpires in the book's opening pages: an act of random violence in which a man and his two daughters are shot at by punks in a passing van, and one of the girls is killed. Dixon's dense, plain-spoken prose perfectly mirrors the chaotic workings of a mind riddled with rage and guilt, where every thought and utterance is second-guessed. A timely, disturbing work that belongs in every fiction collection.
-?David Sowd, formerly with Stark Cty. District Lib. Canton, Ohio
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Henry Holt & Co
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0805026541
• ISBN 13: 9780805026542
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 374