Wimps in Love

By Patricia Blake

TIME TO GO

by Stephen Dixon

Johns Hopkins; 181 pages; $12.50

In the era of the blockbuster novel, short-story writers have had a hard time supporting their habit. While Novelists John Updike and Saul Bellow can afford occasional forays into the briefer forms, a hard-bitten short-story adept like Stephen Dixon, 48, has had to toil as a bartender, waiter and pajama salesman to pay for the privilege of persisting in an unprofitable genre. But a boomlet in short fiction seems to be at hand. Publishers are wagering in increasing numbers that storytellers can attract readers beyond the pages of the little magazines.

In Dixon's case, that risk seems well worth taking. Over the past 24 years he has had some 200 stories published in 125 periodicals, ranging from the venerable North American Review to the ephemeral Nitty-Gritty. Among his seven books, published mainly by small presses, his latest, Time to Go, emphatically establishes him as one of the short story's most accomplished if quirky practitioners.

Almost obsessively, Dixon has doomed the protagonist of most of his stories to repeated and often farcical failures in love. Whether named Mac, Jules or Will, he is conspicuously a loser. Speaking with a strikingly distinctive voice, this hapless character is alternately self-pitying and self-mocking, weepily sentimental and stonily sharp-witted. He unceasingly endures abuse, rejection, infidelity, abandonment and most of the other mortifications that can befall a man in the throes of passion.

End of Magna catches the antihero in the act of talking himself out of the love of his life. "She's too good for me. She's too beautiful, too intelligent, too perceptive, too creative, too everything," begins an interior monologue that could be a manual of masochism. In that story the woman walks out kindly. Not so the 20-year-old in For a Man Your Age, whose explanation of why her lover is too old for her is cruel beyond the call of love or duty. She knows all a man's vulnerabilities and has deadly aim: "You're very experienced, but you're not a young man in bed. You make love the way you do because you have to." The poor chump replies by asking what else is wrong with him and by telling his tormentor: "I'd marry you today and conceive with you tonight if you wanted and we could."

Much of the satiric power of Dixon's stories springs from his reversals of sexual stereotypes. His women tend to be aggressive, and his standard male character is at best foolishly romantic. Yet the final cycle of stories in this collection suggests that a wimp can turn into a mensch. For the first time in the Dixon canon his male character gets the girl. In the title story he actually marries her, in spite of an imagined, ironic commentary on his courtship by his late father. The story Wheels lovingly tells of the baby that is born of the marriage. In one affecting and indeed surprisingly beautiful scene, the man, in diapering his child, is reminded of a time when he nursed his dying, incontinent father. Evidently the resolution of the hero's romantic miseries has brought to Dixon's work not only joy, but insight into the keener shadings of grief. --By Patricia Blake