The Reading Experience

Satisfactions

In his review of Stephen Marche's Shining at the Bottom of the Sea (Riverhead Books), Brian Evenson asserts that too many of the selections in the fictionalized anthology that gives this book its form have "too few of the satisfactions we’ve come to expect from fiction."

On the one hand, Marche would probably be disappointed that this reviewer at least found his book to some degree unsatisfying, but on the other, that this dissatisfaction comes from finding too few of the pleasures "we've come to expect from fiction" doesn't necessarily mean the book has failed. Indeed, if Shining at the Bottom of the Sea provoked the reader into reflecting on the "safisfactions" fiction ought to provide, it probably could be called successful in fulfilling one of the implicit goals of experimental fiction: to remind readers there is no one form fiction has to take, that what is "expected" from fiction isn't necessarily what it always needs to provide.

Shining at the Bottom of the Sea is, it seems to me, an experimental novel in the purest sense of the term. It bypasses almost entirely the conventional elements of the novel--plot, character, point of view--and offers in their place an historical narrative of sorts that unfolds between the lines of the anthologized documents substituting for the "expected" narrative of incident, character revelation, etc. Edited by "Stephan Marche," the documents are primarily a selection of short fictions representing the literary heritage of "Sanjania," a fictional North Atlantic island whose original inhabitants were brought there on Spanish slave ships but which came to be a British colony. The stories are arranged chronologically, thus giving us both a survey of Sanjanian literary history and an exploration of Sanjanian history and culture more broadly (at least as the latter can be inferred through the stories--not necessarily a straightforward process, since they are, after all, fictions and not historical narratives per se.) There is also a section at the end of the volume devoted to "Criticism," which is less literary criticism in the strict sense than a series of nonfiction pieces, including an interview with a living Sanjanian writer, that act to tie together the stories by focusing on important themes and historical motifs. One of the conventional elements of fiction that remains in effect is setting, and it is the way in which Sanjania itself acts as the focus of attention, becomes a kind of character in itself, that leads me to call Shining at the Bottom of the Sea a novel. It's a novel that asks us to expand existing definitions of what a novel might be.

Since this is literally a text highlighting writing as writing, it would have to be categorized as "metafiction," but one of the accomplishments of this book is the way in which it demonstrates how metafiction can be not a symptom of literary narcissism but a perfectly serviceable means to other literary ends. In this case, a text about writing also turns out to be a text about something else, a something else that probably couldn't be evoked in some other manner without sacrificing its unity of effect and a certain kind of efficiency. A sprawling saga about the colonial and post-colonial history of Sanjania is not the sort of thing I would rush to read, but the metafictional ingenuity of Shining at the Bottom of the Sea does appeal; in fact, I am more likely to note the postcoloniast themes inherent in the story of Sanjania as they emerge through the juxtapositions of story and the gradual accumulations of reference than through the more obvious effects of "drama." In my view, readers are more likely to return to a text like Shining at the Bottom of the Sea to try to piece together even more coherently the underlying story of Sanjania and Western colonialism, to align the selections that make up this faux-anthology into an even more comprehensible whole. It's a novel that invites re-reading in a way more conventional narratives do not.

Which does not mean that Evenson is entirely incorrect in suggesting that not all of the individual entries in Marche's anthology-as-novel are equally interesting. Some make for better reading than others. Some play a stronger role in depicting the history of Sanjania than others. In his review of the book at the Toronto Star, Philip Marchand calls it a "pastiche" and comments that in such a work "The reader's assumption is always that the author of a poem or story is doing his best to make it a good poem or story – but this assumption falters when the story or poem is put inside of quotation marks, as it were," asking further: "If the reader finds the story or poem dull, is it because the (real) author has failed or because the reader has missed some part of the joke?" I'm not sure it's necessary we think the author was "doing his best" to make each selection an equally "good poem or story." The contents of the anthology need to reflect the development of Sanjanian literature, but this doesn't mean every story has to be "good" in some universally acceptable sense of the term. It isn't a "joke" if the writer is trying to evoke a particular style that doesn't exactly fulfill expectations of "good" writing. It's possible to achieve "good" writing," to write well, by summoning up a prose style with its own limitations, even that is deliberately wretched (see many of the novels of Gilbert Sorrentino).

Still, some readers might find parts of Shining at the Bottom of the Sea slow-going, not necessarily because they're inattentive readers but because of hazards inherent to the kind of work this is. It may be that Marche has pulled this experiment off about as well as it can be done, or someone inspired by Marche's example might try something similar and avoid its longeurs. (And I don't want to exaggerate their effect. Most of the conjured-up stories are well-done, and the occasional dense patch doesn't obscure the overall realization of the novel's design.) But I would hope that all readers would finally judge it using criteria that are fair to the sort of novel it is rather than those appropriate to other novels using conventions "we’ve come to expect from fiction" that this novel rejects.

What the Author Wishes To Do

Tony Christini observes of John Updike's first rule of reviewing ("Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt") that

Understanding what the author wished to do is necessary, of course, but just as enlightening is evaluating (not “blaming for”) the nature, quality, and context of the “wish,” and also evaluating the achievement and lack thereof. Updike would have reviewers close their eyes and zip their lips, where they should be keen of sight and articulate in illuminating the book and its context. . . .

By and large, I think Updike's rule is sound, although he mistakenly states it as a matter regarding what the author "intended," rather than as one involving what the work at hand actually does, what kind of text it finally is. The author may have intended this or may have intended that, but ulimately the critic can only report on the text itself, as it presents itself.

Tony magnifies Updike's misconception by agreeing that "Understanding what the author wished to do is necessary, of course." It isn't at all necessary to understand "what the author wished to do," unless this means simply the "intention" that can be gleaned from a careful reading of the text. ("The author clearly wished to challenge the conventions of plot by keeping all the important action offstage.") Tony suggests, however, that he doesn't intend "intention" to be confined to the implicit intentions revealed by the text when he notes further that evaluating the "wish" involves evaluating its "achievement." This makes it seem the author's "wish" is something stated prior to the "achievement" of the text (or at least made known at some point, through some kind of declaration), and the critic's task involves evaluating both the wish and its embodiment in the work under scrutiny.

I have no problem with the idea that criticism involves, at least in part, assessing a work of fiction or poetry for the way it carries out its inherent aesthetic intention. I have big problems with the idea that it involves bypassing the text and instead focusing on the "nature, quality, and context of the 'wish'" when that means identifying the author's ideas and beliefs as manifested in some direct statement of intent. (This could also amount to the critic him/herself taking the inherent "intention" and formulating it as an assertion of what the author clearly "meant to say.") I have especially big problems with this approach to criticism when it is devoted specifically to highlighting the political deficiencies of the "wish," which I assume, because of his straighforwardly announced commitment to political criticism, is the method of "illuminating the book and its context" Tony Christini has most in mind. At the very least, it is necessary from this perspective to be able to posit such a thing as the author's "intention," since otherwise only the most obviously polemical or otherwise inept fiction can be reduced to its putative political message.

A work of fiction either succeeds as a work of fiction, aesthetically compelling and free to insinuate "meaning" the author didn't intend but readers find apparent nevertheless, or it isn't. Appealing to the author's externally articulated "intention" can neither rescue a failed fiction from its flaws nor doom an otherwise rewarding work to the prison-house of the author's alleged ideological derelictions. Critics who refuse to "close their eyes and zip their lips" when it comes to such derelictions may or may not be advancing worthwhile political objectives, but they're not contributing anything of value to literature or to literary criticism. In most cases they're not even engaged in literary criticism. So I would amend Updike's rule: Try to perceive what the author's book has accomplished. Do not misperceive it as an artifact of the author's "intent." Judge it according to standards appropriate to the sort of thing it is, not to the sort of thing you'd like it to be.

Saving the Short Story as a Whole

Responding to various recent articles on the state of the short story, and on literary magazines more generally, Ed Champion suggests that

if you want to save the short story as a whole and if you want it to be more than merely the niche markets it currently serves, you’re going to have to get the general population reading short fiction. And this means creating magazines, exclusively devoted to fiction that entertains as well as enlightens, that the public will buy.

I suppose it's true that if you want to take short fiction out of its "niche market," you would have to "get the general population reading short fiction," but regrettably this isn't going to happen. The "general population" a) doesn't read and b) wouldn't read short fiction even if it could be coaxed into reading a little bit more of something. Everyone hearkens back to the "golden age" of the short story published in magazines such as Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post, but those publications ultimately stopped publishing short stories (and most of what they published was tame, conventional fare) and eventually ceased publication altogether precisely because a) the general population doesn't read and b) wouldn't read short fiction even if. . . .

Since the 1950s, university-based literary magazines have taken over the role of publishing short stories, and, if anything, have flooded the market with short fiction. While no one magazine usually lasts for very long (only a handful of those prominent in the 60s and 70s are still publishing today), new ones spring up to take their place as every English department in every college and university in the United States decides it needs to sponsor one. Non-university-based publications start up all the time as well, and although many of their founders appear to believe they will be able to sustain themselves financially, very few of them ever do. Still, its hard to argue that with the proliferation of literary magazines, now abetted by the constant appearance of new literary journals online, that there isn't enough short fiction published in this country. Indeed, most of what is published in the existing journals goes largely unread.

Publishing magazines "exclusively devoted to fiction" that "the public will buy," as futile as this enterprise would surely turn out to be, could only mean to dumb down the current tenor of literary magazines, to publish more conventional, more "accessible" fiction. I can't see what purpose this would serve. Such fiction would not be "better" for its readers than Desperate Housewives. It would identify fiction as just another entertainment option, a way to pass some time while easing up on the electricity bill. You are not better off reading a bland and undemanding short story than you are watching a bland and undemanding tv show. If just weaning a few people away from visual entertainment back to print is the goal, forget it. Not enough people will convert to make the effort worthwhile.

What is needed is not more short story publications "exclusively devoted to fiction" that appeal more widely but fewer publications devoted exclusively to fiction (or poetry, for that matter) and more that appeal to the discerning audience for serious fiction that actually exists. What is needed is for editors of literary magazines, both established and up-and-coming, to not just publish fiction shorn of all context and mixed together in an otherwise indigestible stew but to indicate, both through editorial commentary and consistent editorial choices, what they think is important about the fiction they publish. Why have they selected it? What larger vision of the possibilities of short fiction does the selection illustrate? In my opinion, the "miscellany" approach practiced by most literary magazines--by which the "best fiction available" is printed, with little or no indication of what makes it the "best"--makes all too many of them useless; I can only make my way through a few of them, trying to find the "best" in a scattershot fashion, before I put them aside and conclude it just isn't worth my time (and sometimes money) to prospect for fiction in this way.

Most importantly, literary magazines need to abandon the "exclusively devoted to fiction" strategy altogether. More of them need to publish criticism and serious literary journalism, in part to make up for the sad state of newspaper reviewing, but also to provide the even larger and more crucial context that situates current fiction within literary history as well as present aesthetic and cultural debates. This would signal that we still take short fiction (all fiction) seriously, that it is part of a rich historical traditon to which new fiction continues to aspire and that more is at stake than providing a few more writers with vitae items or adding yet another "little magazine" to all the others sitting forlornly on library shelves. Letting thousands of fictional flowers bloom might seem a pretty idea, but without some critical tending, they will all just rot.

Problems in the Story Line

In her book Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America (University of Missouri Press), former Boston Review editor Gail Pool writes:

Readers dismayed by the lack of criticism in reviews won't find more of it in other coverage, most of which is promotion, sometimes in disguise. Newspaper book features--profiles and interviews--are promotional. Readings are promotional. "Reviews" written by booksellers, even independent booksellers, are promotional. Book clubs are promotional. Even readers' guides are promotional: produced by the publishers to enhance the books' value for--and sales to--reading groups, they may be designed to encourage more thoughtful reading, but they don't encourage a critical approach. None of the guides seem to ask readers to question the quality of a book's prose, its cliched characterization, or the problems in its story line. They start from the premise that the books are good, and it's their purpose to help readers "understand" why they're good, not discover they aren't.

Nor will readers frustrated by the quality of criticism in traditional reviewing find it improved by its nontraditional counterparts. On the contrary, in self-published reviews on the Web--the main nontraditional alternative--critical failings are and are bound to be exacerbated. It may be that editors too often fail to do their job in ensuring that reviews are unbiased, informed, well written, or critically astute, but I don't see how it can possibly be an improvement to eliminate the role of editor, the readers' only chance for quality control. Unscreened, anonymous, and unedited, self-published reviews can be--an often are--as biased, uninformed, ungrammatical, and critically illiterate as they like. (122)

Pool, as she does throughout her book, shares the delusion common among "professional" book reviewers that "criticism" and " book review" are synonymous terms--or at least that at their best newspaper and magazine reviews do embody what "criticism" is all about. Pool offers plenty of objections to the standards of book reviewing as currently practiced, but she never relinquishes the notion that reviewing, when done right, is an act of literary criticism, sine qua non.

For Pool, the defining feature of criticism is the more specific act of passing judgment. "Critical" in Pool's lexicon comes close to its overly literal and reductive meaning as "finding fault" (or looking for faults but happily not finding many). A novel has "problems in its story line" or fails to meet some predetermined measure of "quality" with which the critic is inspecting the text and pronouncing it fit or flawed. Discovering that a book might not be good becomes an urgent and noble endeavor that only the "critic," properly detached and unbiased, can venture to undertake.

As I have suggested previously, critical judgment can never be avoided entirely; it always lies behind discussions of aesthetic merit. But in my opinion, judgment is only the precursor to criticism, its necessary spark but not at all its fulfillment, which is only to be found in the further elucidation of the way the work constitutes itself as a work of fiction or poetry, of the specific nature of the experience of reading the work attentively. The work may present itself in a way that is completely familiar or utterly alien, or somewhere in between. The critic at the least must give a plausible enough account of the text's perceptible qualities to make the critical judgment credible, but just as often judgment might be simply assumed, taken for granted, even neglected altogether. Criticism that is able to "encourage more thoughtful reading" is valuable criticism indeed, and if in many cases the critic discusses works he/she implicity values highly in order to "help readers 'understand' why they're good," this is probably in the long run a much more worthwhile expenditure of critical energy than the effort to demonstrate that some works aren't. (This use of critical intelligence to illuminate the aesthetic accomplishments of literary works amounts to the "promotion" of literature in the very best sense the term can bear.)

Pool is especially determined to preserve the prerogatives of editors in providing "criticism" through book reviewing. To me, this is a non sequitur. Criticism is an unavoidably personal, very individualized activity. It's my encounter with the text, your encounter with the text, not this encounter as mediated by some third party presuming to act as gatekeeper. When Pool invokes "quality control" as the editor's job description, she's identifying this as a function within the heirarchy of a newspaper or magazine. Bias-, fact-, and grammar-checking are imperatives of journalism as practiced by a self-appointed group of so-called professionals in a self-limited sphere of work, not of literary criticism, which can be (in some cases should be) thoroughly biased, indifferent to "facts" except the facts of the text at hand, and resistant to hidebound rules of grammar when they interfere with the expression of difficult ideas or impede critical insight.

Even if we accept that newspaper or magazine book sections often benefit from inspired editing, Pool's own book often reveals that this sort of inspiration is sorely lacking in most book review pages. The "plight" of book reviewing is mostly a plight of editing, which fails to provide much in the way of "quality control" in the first place and has made book reviewing in America an activity without great relevance and characterized by a stale conformity of approach. At the top of Pool's list of needed reforms is "a better means of choosing books for review" (125). "Our current system," she writes, "inevitably leads to overlooking good books, overpraising bad ones, and undermining the book page." Well, who exactly is to blame for this "current system" in which the wrong books are reviewed, bad books are praised, and the book page trivialized if not the editors of the book pages? Don't they determine what gets reviewed and who does the reviewing? Aren't they responsible for publishing bland and vacuous reviews? Why in the world would we want to revive book reviewing by reinvesting in the very process that has caused the problem to begin with?

As far as I can tell, the concern among print reviewers and editors such as Gail Pool (also expressed by numerous other such figures over the past few months) that book reviewing be saved, not least from the ragtag bloggers, comes from a fear that their identities as "book critics" are imperiled. It can't be from a fear that literature or literary criticism is imperiled, since Faint Praise itself demonstrates that book reviewing as now exemplified by working "literary journalists" has precious little to do with either. Since book reviewers are paid so little, and since, as again Pool herself attests, book reviewing is viewed by other journalists as occupying the bottom rung of the prestige ladder, the disdain for literary blogs and other "nontraditional" sources of literary discussion that drips from the pens of Gail Pool and Richard Schickel and Michael Dirda must rise from a mounting fear that their sense of separation from mere "amateurs" is at risk: If you can't look down on bloggers, after all, who can you look down on?

Faint Praise at the same time both pinpoints the reasons why book reviewing in the usual print publications can't be taken seriously and argues that book reviewing can be saved only if the current "system" and the current mode of publication remain the same, with a little tweaking and a little "education' of reviewers who game the system to their own benefit and of readers who have otherwise come to see this system as the adjunct to "book business" hucksterism that it is. It demonstrates why book reviewing as a form of literary journalism is probably doomed: Its author can see the flaws in the "system" in which she works, but can't imagine a solution outside of that system, even when such a solution is probably the only kind available.

Mindful

Matt Cheney quotes approvingly from this blog post by John Harrison. Some of what John says I wholeheartedly endorse:

Substitute imagination for exhaustiveness, and inventiveness for research. As a reader I’m not interested in a “fully worked out” world. I’m not interested in “self consistency”. I don’t care what kind of underpants Iberian troops wore in 1812, or if I do I can find out about it for myself. I don’t want the facts about the Silk Road or the collapse of the Greenland Colony, sugared up & presented in three-volumes as an imaginary world. I don’t want to be talked through your enthusiasm for costume. I don’t want be talked through anything.

A good deal of my own frustration in reading science fiction comes precisely from a similar impatience with the "exhaustive" treatment of a "fully-worked out world" in which an obsessive focus on picayune detail is substituted for imagination. In such works, "realism" and "fantasy" seem separated by the thinnest line of mere plausibility. In one case the story might have "really" happened, in the other we know it couldn't, but the texture of the "worlds" created and the method of storytelling employed are essentially identical.

I have more trouble with this:

When I read fantasy, I read for the bizarre, the wrenched, the undertone of difference & weirdness that defamiliarises the world I know. I want the taste of the writer’s mind, I want to feel I’m walking about in the edges of the individual personality.

Not because I necessarily disagree with either of these sentences taken alone. Each advances a perfectly coherent expectation of a particular kind of writing. But the two statements aren't really coherent with one another.

I myself like fiction that emphasizes "the bizarre, the wrenched, the undertone of difference & weirdness that defamiliarises the world I know." I also like some realistic fiction that "defamiliarizes the world I know." In each case, however, I'm focused on the aesthetic particulars of the text in question, the strategies it uses in its "world-creation." I'm focused on the text: what it does, what it's like, how its aesthetic qualities are manifested.

I frankly don't really know what it means to get a "taste of the writer's mind" in a work of fiction. The writer's mind belongs to the writer, not the work. Maybe if I'm reading a memoir or other work of nonfiction I might want to think that, figuratively speaking at least, I'm "walking about in the edges of the individual personality," but for me "personality" has nothing to do with my experience of the words on the page in a novel or short story. Looked at long enough with a determination to find "personality" in a work of literature, perhaps the work will offer up such, but in my view this would ulimately be just as much an artifact of the text as any other material feature readers find there. The personality found, in, say, Samuel Beckett's work is not the personality of the actual Beckett but that which a close reading of the texts reveals is a consistent characteristic--when read in a certain way--of the "Beckett text."

If this is really all John Harrison himself is suggesting in his reference to "personality" and "the writer's mind," then we're not really substantively disagreeing. These are terms that denote a "sensibility" that seems to pervade an author's work and that provide it with a kind of unity of effect. One might also refer to this as a certain kind of "intelligence" that sets the work apart from other works in which the guiding principle does seem to be an "exhaustiveness" of presentation, a fabricated authenticity that comes from dissociated details rather than a more adventurous literary imagination.

Still, I've never really understood the common enough tendency to speak of literary texts as if they were emanations of "mind" to whose wavelength we might want to tune in. I've never really understood why we should want to have access to these wavelengths in the first place. Are writers' minds more special than everyone else's? More awe-inspiring? I'm interested in what writers as literary artists create, not in what we can perceive of their disembodied "minds."

Saying This and This Too

If Stephen Dixon's work shows that it is possible to register in fiction the unfolding immediacy of experience without resorting to facile "psychological realism," Kent Haruf's Plainsong demonstrates that fiction can effect a perfectly plausible and convincing rendering of ordinary experience without "getting inside" the heads of its characters at all.

Almost any passage from the novel would do as illustration, since Haruf's approach is remarkably consistent throughout. This is the final paragraph of the first chapter, which is centered on Tom Guthrie, one of the novel's alternating protagonists:

Downstairs, passing through the house, Guthrie could hear the two boys talking in the kitchen, their voices clear, high-pitched, animated again. He stopped for a minute to listen. Something to do with school. Some boy saying this and this too and another one, the boy, saying it wasn't any of that either, because he knew better, on the gravel playground out back of school. He went outside across the porch and across the drvie toward the pickup. A faded red Dodge with a deep dent in the left rear fender. The weather was clear, the day was bright and still early and the air felt fresh and sharp, and Guthrie had a brief feeling of uplift and hopefulness. He took a cigarette from his pocket and lit it and stood for a moment looking at the silver poplar tree. Then he got into the pickup and cranked it and drove out of the drive onto Railroad Street and headed up the five or six blocks toward Main. Behind him the pickup lifted a powdery plume from the road and the suspended dust shone like bright flecks of gold in the sun.

The point of view here is not quite omniscient, since the third-person narration does cleave to Guthrie's limited perspective ("Something to do with," "Some boy saying this and this too"--incomplete information because it is incomplete or unclear to Guthrie), at least until the final sentence, when it leaves Guthrie's vantage point to report on the dust left in his wake. But never does it presume to burrow itself beneath Guthrie's conscious awareness, to take us along as well and oblige us to look back out on the world from the subjective set of perceptions roiling around in his mind. Indeed, most of this paragraph consists of a straightforward, externally-based narration of events: "He stopped for a moment to listen"; "He went out across the porch"; "Then he got into the pickup." We're not invited to share Tom's "brief feeling of uplift and hopefulness," not clued in further to the nature of this feeling; we're simply told that he had it.

The rest of the novel proceeds in this way. The things that Tom Guthrie, his children Ike and Bobby, the pregnant teen Victoria Roubideaux, and others do are related to us, but we do not experience these things through them. They just happen, and the characters deal with what happens to them in the best way they can. By the time we've finished reading Plainsong, we can't really say we "know" its characters in the way we're encouraged to do so in most narratives steeped in psychological realism. These novels pretend to tell us what's essential about their characters, what literally characterizes them at the "deep" level. They're rung through the rhetorical ringer; very little mystery is left. As a result, in the end, they're boring. The characters in Plainsong to an extent remain enigmatic, and they're more convincing as a result.

I didn't really expect to like Plainsong. I thought it would be just another exercise in "local color" a la Richard Russo. But Haruf isn't much like Russo, at least not in this book. His characters seem authentic because they're presented to us with a stark simplicity we assume must be honest. There's no laboring after "vivid" details and colorful tics, no quaint, picturesque descriptions. It's an intensely realistic novel, but unpretentiously so.

Out of My Head

In an otherwise positive review of Stephen Dixon's Meyer (which I haven't yet read), Craig Morgan Teicher asserts tht "While Dixon's jerky prose, often cast in several-page paragraphs, can be slow going, it's impossible to stop reading, in part because Dixon is so amazing at giving the sense of being inside somebody else's head."

I don't agree that Dixon's prose can be "slow going." It's usually demotic, accessible, briskly paced. That Dixon does not use his thoroughly transparent prose style--there's no forced figurative language, no frills, all of its focus is on evoking the realities of a world recognizably our own--to tell a conventionally plotted story with only the dramatic bits (those activities that give the story its proper "arc") included is what might make his fictions slow going for some readers who wonder where all the familiar narrative markers have gone. Dixon's prose doesn't "jerk." It ebbs and flows with the particular, momentary circumstances in which his characters are immersed.

But I especially can't agree with the notion that what Dixon is ultimately after is "the sense of being inside someone else's head." His stories and novels certainly wind themselves around the experience of protagonists, almost always male, usually bearing life stories and characteristics we assume are close to those of Stephen Dixon, whose activities are recounted in rather minute detail, but they do not engage in the usual probing of these characters' minds to create "psychological realism" of the now-customary kind.

Here's the opening of the chapter called "Frog Acts," from Dixon's 1991 novel, Frog:

In bed, must be late, no car traffic outside, light coming in, been asleep, up, asleep again, hears a noise in the apartment. He's on his side, front to his wife's back, both no clothes, hand on her thigh. Kids in the bedrooms down the hall. Light noise again. Could be the cat. Whispers "Denise, you hear anything? Denise?" Doesn't say anything, still asleep. He's quiet, holds his breath, listens. Nothing. Lets out his breath, holds it again. Sound of feet. Something. Moving slowly, sliding almost. Sliding, that's the sound. Could be the cat doing something unusual. Slight floorboard squeak. Cat's made that too. Should get up. Scared. Cold feeling in his stomach, on his face. Has to do something, what, scream? It it's someone then that person could in one of the kids' rooms, at one of their doors. Gets on his back, holds his breath. No sound. Lets it out, holds it. Shuffling. Sure of it. Down the hall's wood floor, just a few inches. Shuffling stops, as if he picked up Howard listening. . . .

The first sentence is entirely objective, entirely descriptive, as the narrator (it is a third-person narrator, as in almost all of Dixon's fictions) attempts to orient us to "Frog" orienting himself as he wakes up. It is not a very omniscient narrator (thus the "must be late"), but neither does the narrator/narration simply arise from within the perspective of the character. This outer-oriented narration continues for the next several sentences, although it is interrupted by what could be taken as internal notations of perception--"Light noise again. Could be the cat." Yet these could just as easily be taken as truncated expository signals: "Light noise again" functions simply to tell us that the noise that woke Frog has sounded again. "Could be the cat" does seem to report on Frog's reaction, but it's really a pretty superficial intrusion on his thought process. "'Could be the cat,' he thinks."

A fairly straightforward burst of speech then begins another series of reports on Frog's actions. He hold his breath, listens, hears nothing, breathes again. Then: "Sound of feet. Something. Moving slowly, sliding almost. Sliding, that's the sound. Could be the cat doing something unusual." While this proceeds from Frog's vantage point as the listener, none of it is going on only inside his head. It's still a way of relating (radically reduced as it obviously is) what is happening. Frog hears the sound, determines it must be "sliding." "Sliding, that's the sound" does seem to enter Frog's thought stream more explicitly, as it tells us that something like this articulated thought literally goes through his mind. "Cat's made that too" and "Should get up" also seem to be manifestations of Frog's specific thoughts, although "Scared" is unlikely to have occurred to him so explicitly. It's again the narrator's extremely compacted declaration. The rest of the passage continues with this alernation of condensed exposition and crystallized thought--"Cold feeling in his stomach, on his face. Has to do something, what, scream?"--until the final sentence brings us fully outside Frog's perspective with the registering of his name.

At the most, both the thoughts and the spoken words of Dixon's characters are recorded as if they were part of the scene of action, not as if they constituted a separate realm from the perspective of which the scene, events more broadly, are to be understood. Sometimes, as in his recent novels Old Friends and Phone Rings, the characters's spoken words are a kind of substitute for thought, a way of externalizing internal states into concrete action. You could call this "psychological realism" of a sort, but usually Dixon finds a way of avoiding the tedious exploration of "Mind" some critics would have us believe is the primary purpose of fiction. Thus Dixon's work does provide us with a vivid rendering of his characters' sense of their immediate surroundings and their ongoing interactions with those surroundings, but not through facilely thrusting us "inside somebody else's head."