Stephen Dixon, one of America's great literary treasures, has completed
his first novel in five years -- His Wife Leaves Him, a long, intimate
exploration of the interior life of a husband who has lost his wife.
His Wife Leaves Him is as achingly simple as its title: A man, Martin,
thinks about the loss of his wife, Gwen. In Dixon's hands, however, this
straightforward premise becomes a work of such complexity that it no
longer appears to be words on pages so much as life itself. Dixon, like
all great writers, captures consciousness. Stories matter here, and the
writer understands how people tell them and why they go on retelling
them, for stories, finally, may be all that Martin has of Gwen.
Reminders of their shared past, some painful, some hilarious, others
blissful and sensual, appear and reappear in the present. Stories made
from memories merge with dreams of an impossible future they'll never
get to share. Memories and details grow fuzzy, get corrected, and then
wriggle away, out of reach again. Martin holds all these stories dear.
They leaven grief so that he may again experience some joy. Story by
story then, he accounts for himself, good and bad, moments of grace,
occasions for disappointment, promises and arguments. From these things
are their lives made. In His Wife Leaves Him, Stephen Dixon has
achieved nothing short of the resurrection of a life through words. When
asked to describe his latest work, the author said that "it's about a
bunch of nouns: love, guilt, sickness, death, remorse, loss, family,
matrimony, sex, children, parenting, aging, mistakes, incidents,
minutiae, birth, music, writing, jobs, affairs, memory, remembering,
reminiscences, forgetting, repression, dreams, reverie, nightmares,
meeting, dating, conceiving, imagining, delaying, loving." His Wife
Leaves Him is Dixon's most important and ambitious novel, his tenderest
and funniest writing to date, and the stylistic and thematic summation
of his writing life.
