Sleep
STEPHEN DIXON

The stories in <Sleep> represent twenty-five years of work by one of America's best experimental fiction writers.

The edgy, obsessive characters in <Sleep> revise themselves as they speak, in sentences that cross themselves out and start over, as his narrators examine and explore every possible alternative, to the point where these texts become palimpsests, recording not only what is or was, but what might be. And it is left to the reader to determine which is which. Is which.

This collection tests the range of Dixon's technique, including stories that continue his exploration of perspective by switching from the male to the female point of view in a relationship. Dixon's narrators have been described by Richard Eder in a <Newsday> review of <Gould: A Novel in Two Novels> as "discursive, witty, amiably rueful: the voice of Woody Allen before the headlines hit."

Dixon's stylistic innovation is no mere postmodern exercise, because at heart he is a humanist. In the opening story a man observes an opera rehearsal in the park and imagines the soprano flirts with him. The story switches from his anticipation of possible pick-up lines to her consideration of the same, and ends with the two heading into a coffee shop. The narrator's apparent callousness in the title story is revealed by the end to be animal exhaustion, with the reader aware that the author looks on even the basest human foible with tolerance if not affection.