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Frog
The esteemed and prescient critic John Hollander wrote that "Frog represents a new phase of Stephen Dixon's work, and manifests a new concentration of creative power and unfailing rhetorical control, and it should certainly bring him the broadened recognition which is already so deep a one." Indeed, when first published in 1991, Frog earned Dixon nominations for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award and elevation to the front rank of American letters. Combining interrelated novels, stories, and novellas, Dixon's multilayered and frequently hilarious family epic—the story of Howard Tetch, his ancestors, his parents, his children, and the generations that follow—"reassures us that whatever is precious can never be completely lost" (The Baltimore Sun).
769 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 1991
29 people are currently reading
739 people want to read
About the author
Stephen Dixon
65 books79 followersStephen Dixon was a novelist and short story author who published hundreds of stories in an incredible list of literary journals. Dixon was nominated for the National Book Award twice--in 1991 for Frog and in 1995 for Interstate--and his writing also earned him a Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Academy Institute of Arts and Letters Prize for Fiction, the O. Henry Award, and the Pushcart Prize.
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October 7, 2021
Frog was a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction in 1991, placing Stephen Dixon in the spotlight for the first time in his thirty year writing career. The author's previous four novels and ten short story collections were published in small literary presses, many of the individual stories appearing first in tiny saddle stitch magazines such as Asylum Arts and Ozone.
Frog is 769 pages, composed of one novel, three novellas and 17 short stories, all interconnected, all with titles like Frog Remembers, Frog Dances, Frog Takes a Swim, Frog’s Mom, Frog Reads the News.
Frog is about a little known fiction writer by the name of Howard Tetch aka Frog. Tetch has a wife and two small children and comes from a large family. Turning the pages, we becoming better acquainted with not only the nitty-gritty of Tetch's day-to-day grind in his many roles (private, professional, family, social, anti-social - the list goes on) but his extended family through generations, large portions told in what isn't so much stream of consciousness as what could be termed spin of consciousness.
Ah, signature Stephen Dixon spin of consciousness. Here's a minuscule clip from Frog Fragments, a chapter covering over 250 pages where paragraphs will continue on page after page after page: "She says, when he's making the couch up, pretending not to notice her going back and forth from bathroom to bedroom, trying to push his penis back between his thighs because it's sticking straight out, "Listen," in a short nightie, nipples and pubes seen through, "why don't you sleep with me tonight, if you promise to take off those godawful shorts." "You want me to wear boxer shorts instead of briefs?" "Anything. Nothing, under your pants, if I had the choice, between those and no underclothes." Engaged in a couple of months. Proposes in her building's basement while they're taking clothes out of the washer and sorting them and putting most into the drier. "I know this is the wrong place but would you, if I asked, marry me?" and she says "Why, what other place would be more memorable to be asked that except maybe the toilet? and I'd love to." "Let me get it straight - for the record as we reporters like to say - I never did but I heard about it - you'd love to marry me?" Yes, I would." You will marry me then?" "Yes, I said it.""
On occasion, Tetch the Frog will generate a number of possible past happenings or versions of the present or future possibilities as if exploring a Borges garden of forking paths. But, no matter, once we shift into Stephen Dixon's high-strung staccato, we gladly play along.
Regarding the author's quirky writing style, the most insightful observation I've come across is from Alan H. Friedman's New York Times review of the novel: "One doesn't exactly read a story by Stephen Dixon; one submits to it. An unstoppable prose expands the arteries while an edgy, casual nervousness overpowers the will. Still, this irresistible text is bound to meet immovable readers; I'd like to be there to pick up the pieces."
Frog is an astonishingly original work of fiction. I've never read anything quite like it. Such a distinctive, compressed writing style and so much like a frog, hopping from chapter to chapter wherein Frog searches for Kafka's grave, members of Frog's family are shipped off in a cattle car to a Nazi death camp, Frog considers what he would have been if a soldier or farmer, Frog offers encouragement to his dying sister, Frog speaks as a corpse.
Many chapters deserve a special call-out but I'll focus on Frog's Interview. As a dedicated book reviewer, I just can't help myself. Several direct quizzical quotes coupled with my comments:
"I wrote a letter suggesting an interview with him. He wrote back "I've been interviewed twice in the last three years and the day after each interview I told the interviewers to erase the tapes and tear up their notes." There's something of the actual Stephen Dixon injected into these lines. I've not only read a number of his interviews online but I vividly recall listening to a Dixon interview some years back. He's more than happy to talk about his work but there's a prickliness if he hears the interviewer making bold assumptions about his voice and stories. Also, Stephen Dixon doesn't hold back when it comes to a publishing industry more interested in money than supporting quality literature.
"Listen, I don't want people knowing where I came from . . . how my life leaks into my fiction and vice versa and what comes from the real and what from the imagination and what kind of instrument I use to sharpen my typewriters every morning, and so on. I also can't answer your questions in writing because I'm a writer who only writes fiction. Whose only nonfiction, in fact, since I was a pimp maybe 25 years ago, and was an article called 'Why a Pimp Can't Write Nonfiction.'" Again, this is stellar Stephen Dixon, a writer who has spent many hours of nearly every day of his adult life sitting at his typewriter writing stories. He's not interested in theory or literary criticism (unless I've missed something, I don't believe Stephen Dixon ever wrote a book review) nor is he interested in writing about history or current events. I can almost hear him screaming, "Leave me alone so I can write my stories!"
"I'm not a bright guy. Fact is, I'm dense and intellectually dumb. You can see that by what I say and how I say it. I might know my way around a typewriter keyboard when I'm alone with it, and that for sure is arguable, but just about nowhere else." And yet again, Stephen Dixon-like. As a fiction writer, one need not be an intellectual or even an articulate conversationalist; what is needed is an keen ability to translate one's vision and voice into writing, one word, one sentence, one paragraph at a time. Exactly what Stephen Dixon does well.
When asked what's going on in American fiction from his point of view, Frog answered: "Writing, lots of writing. Short stories and novels. Some novellas. Short shorts are in. Cuffs are out again and pleats are back." You tell her, Frog! What does she think you are - a journalist? a critic? historian? Damn, you are a fiction writer!
Coda: Stephen Dixon died in hospice on Wednesday, 11/6/2019, at age 83. A warmhearted, sensitive man. You will be missed, Stephen.
American short story writer and novelist Stephen Dixon, 1936-2019
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October 30, 2019An Unusual Form for a Long Novel
There's an interview with David Foster Wallace, in which Michael Silverblatt miraculously guesses that Infinite Jest is structured like a fractal. In fact, Wallace says, it's built like a Sierpinski gasket (more commonly called a Sierpinski triangle). As far as I know, no one has followed up on that; there's even a book out from Bloomsbury on form in Infinite Jest (2017) that devotes only half of one paragraph to Wallace's claim. I assume the structure is not legible in the published version because of the "mercy cuts," as Wallace put it elsewhere, but the fundamental idea is very interesting: small things are blown up to large ones, and vice versa, and the structure is recursive, enclosing near-copies of structures within each other, potentially without end.
That is one model for the structure of a long novel. I've looked, but I haven't found any studies of structures of the maximalist postwar novel, except David Letzler's interesting 2017 book "The Cruft of Fiction" (perhaps symptomatically, Letzler has left academia). Yet a study of large-scale form would be hlepful for anyone interested in understanding what counts as whole, coherent, or complete in works by Schmidt, Vollmann, Barth, Gaddis, and other long-form writers. (Barth is perhaps especially pertinent to Dixon, because the two of them ran the writing program at Johns Hopkins.)
Stephen Dixon's Frog (1991) is interesting in this context, because it is fractal in a different sense than Infinite Jest. Dixon is a compulsive writer and publisher, and his vita looks like a tabulation of all the literary journals publishing in English in the last forty years. He's said somewhere that he had about 46 publications and half that many publishers, because he'd be dropped as soon as the second book failed to sell.
Most of his output is short fiction, and a fair percentage of that is very short, nearly flash fiction. His novels, with Frog perhaps the most interesting, are studies in the aggregation of short forms into long ones. Frog is 769 pages long, and divided into 21 chapters. Most of those are short, on the order of 15 pages. "Frog's Mom" is a novella at 110 pages, and "Frog Fragments" a full-size novel at 220 pages. As William Ferguson says,
"It is as if the central character, Howard Tetch, represented several versions of what one man might be – a portrait that includes not only his physical attributes but the host of possibilities that swarm around his life like bees around a flower... The most startling of these stories is "Frog Made Free," in which the four members of the Tetch family mysteriously find themselves in a cattle car on their way to a Nazi death camp. (Auschwitz's infamous motto, "Arbeit Macht Frei," is ironically echoed in the title.) We know from other stories – or we think we know – that the Tetch family belongs not to the Holocaust years but to later decades, yet nothing in the text indicates that this episode is a nightmare from which Howard might conceivably awaken. Such a daring imposition of characters on the past recalls one of the fundamental aims of fiction: in the midst of particularities, to be in some way suprapersonal, historic, truer than any individual truth could be." [William Ferguson, "Which Version Do You Prefer?," New York Times, September 4, 1994.]
Dixon's style is telegraphic, abbreviated, compulsive, informal, breathless, concise in grammar and excessive in the permission he gives himself to run on. The basic strategy of Frog is the entertainment of possible alternate stories and futures.
In one chapter, the main character imagines what would happen if he went downstairs to investigate a noise; the chapter explores dozens of alternatives, one after another with no segues. In other chapters he thinks about his sister, his wife, and his brother, and their fates and paths through life. Even brief chapters ramify into dozens of stories, all plausible the moment they're told. Sometimes the truth of a death or an illness emerges as the chapter progresses, and in that case the multiple stories carry a heavy burden of pathos, as we're invited to think of the narrator's sad helpless rehearsal of alternate pasts. Other times the multiple possibilities aren't resolved, and readers get a less focused sense of the narrator's frantic mental state.
Frog is nineteen entirely separable short stories, a novel, and a novella, under one cover. The nineteen short stories are mostly self-contained. Some are as tightly composed as his free-standing short stories. I think Dixon wrote his way toward "Frog Fragments," because it contains echoes and repetitions of some earlier chapters; but most chapters are potentially independent. On the face of it, then, Frog isn't coherent, and in fact it's ostentatiously disunified. But the endlessly multiplied branching narratives in each chapter produce a fractal effect: the chapters divide into dozens or hundreds of parts, and they are in turn aggregated into the whole of Frog. Because the stories ramify, the ramified chapters are less incoherent. It's an interesting model for a large novel.
Dixon himself has talked about the structure of his novels, but he has a perhaps unhelpfully laissez-faire way of thinking about form. About Frog, he said: "I wrote the first draft of the first story (chapter?) in it in Prague – it's called "Frog in Prague" – and I finished it in Maine, summer, '85, and continued to write stories with Frog in it, and then the stories got longer and I had novella-length and novel-length stories, and that's how it was written. I never know how long a work is going to be when I start it, and I rarely know where it's going to go and what the structure of the work will be." (Sean Carroll, interview in Bookslut, December 2010.)
It's a separate question how well this works. Dixon has had an unusual number of negative reviews. According to Vince Pissarro,
"The run-on sentences, the rapid-fire but mundane stream of consciousness, the apparently frank but merely amphetamined dialogue that goes back and forth and back and forth within page after page of unbroken paragraphs that stretch as far as the eye can see: these devices are no longer energized by an author who has anything fresh to say... Exchanges like [that] are too easily achieved – too easily typed, even – and they're not challenging to the reader or to Dixon himself." [Vince Passaro, "S.A.S.E," New York Times, May 16, 1999.]
But this kind of criticism is too simple, and so is the complaint – common on Amazon and Goodreads – about Dixon's formlessness and endlessness. His narrators are compulsive, and so is the implied author, who writes at speed. His signature style, which omits particles, verbs, punctuation, and prepositions, is a direct effect of his frantic frame of mind: Write! Think! Publish! Don't stop! And when that frame of mind is applied to the dissolution of memories, as it is in Frog, the result can be intensely expressive. It has the irritability of some Alzheimer's patients, and the everyday anxiety of any middle-aged person trying to make sense of her unraveling life.
There's an interview with David Foster Wallace, in which Michael Silverblatt miraculously guesses that Infinite Jest is structured like a fractal. In fact, Wallace says, it's built like a Sierpinski gasket (more commonly called a Sierpinski triangle). As far as I know, no one has followed up on that; there's even a book out from Bloomsbury on form in Infinite Jest (2017) that devotes only half of one paragraph to Wallace's claim. I assume the structure is not legible in the published version because of the "mercy cuts," as Wallace put it elsewhere, but the fundamental idea is very interesting: small things are blown up to large ones, and vice versa, and the structure is recursive, enclosing near-copies of structures within each other, potentially without end.
That is one model for the structure of a long novel. I've looked, but I haven't found any studies of structures of the maximalist postwar novel, except David Letzler's interesting 2017 book "The Cruft of Fiction" (perhaps symptomatically, Letzler has left academia). Yet a study of large-scale form would be hlepful for anyone interested in understanding what counts as whole, coherent, or complete in works by Schmidt, Vollmann, Barth, Gaddis, and other long-form writers. (Barth is perhaps especially pertinent to Dixon, because the two of them ran the writing program at Johns Hopkins.)
Stephen Dixon's Frog (1991) is interesting in this context, because it is fractal in a different sense than Infinite Jest. Dixon is a compulsive writer and publisher, and his vita looks like a tabulation of all the literary journals publishing in English in the last forty years. He's said somewhere that he had about 46 publications and half that many publishers, because he'd be dropped as soon as the second book failed to sell.
Most of his output is short fiction, and a fair percentage of that is very short, nearly flash fiction. His novels, with Frog perhaps the most interesting, are studies in the aggregation of short forms into long ones. Frog is 769 pages long, and divided into 21 chapters. Most of those are short, on the order of 15 pages. "Frog's Mom" is a novella at 110 pages, and "Frog Fragments" a full-size novel at 220 pages. As William Ferguson says,
"It is as if the central character, Howard Tetch, represented several versions of what one man might be – a portrait that includes not only his physical attributes but the host of possibilities that swarm around his life like bees around a flower... The most startling of these stories is "Frog Made Free," in which the four members of the Tetch family mysteriously find themselves in a cattle car on their way to a Nazi death camp. (Auschwitz's infamous motto, "Arbeit Macht Frei," is ironically echoed in the title.) We know from other stories – or we think we know – that the Tetch family belongs not to the Holocaust years but to later decades, yet nothing in the text indicates that this episode is a nightmare from which Howard might conceivably awaken. Such a daring imposition of characters on the past recalls one of the fundamental aims of fiction: in the midst of particularities, to be in some way suprapersonal, historic, truer than any individual truth could be." [William Ferguson, "Which Version Do You Prefer?," New York Times, September 4, 1994.]
Dixon's style is telegraphic, abbreviated, compulsive, informal, breathless, concise in grammar and excessive in the permission he gives himself to run on. The basic strategy of Frog is the entertainment of possible alternate stories and futures.
In one chapter, the main character imagines what would happen if he went downstairs to investigate a noise; the chapter explores dozens of alternatives, one after another with no segues. In other chapters he thinks about his sister, his wife, and his brother, and their fates and paths through life. Even brief chapters ramify into dozens of stories, all plausible the moment they're told. Sometimes the truth of a death or an illness emerges as the chapter progresses, and in that case the multiple stories carry a heavy burden of pathos, as we're invited to think of the narrator's sad helpless rehearsal of alternate pasts. Other times the multiple possibilities aren't resolved, and readers get a less focused sense of the narrator's frantic mental state.
Frog is nineteen entirely separable short stories, a novel, and a novella, under one cover. The nineteen short stories are mostly self-contained. Some are as tightly composed as his free-standing short stories. I think Dixon wrote his way toward "Frog Fragments," because it contains echoes and repetitions of some earlier chapters; but most chapters are potentially independent. On the face of it, then, Frog isn't coherent, and in fact it's ostentatiously disunified. But the endlessly multiplied branching narratives in each chapter produce a fractal effect: the chapters divide into dozens or hundreds of parts, and they are in turn aggregated into the whole of Frog. Because the stories ramify, the ramified chapters are less incoherent. It's an interesting model for a large novel.
Dixon himself has talked about the structure of his novels, but he has a perhaps unhelpfully laissez-faire way of thinking about form. About Frog, he said: "I wrote the first draft of the first story (chapter?) in it in Prague – it's called "Frog in Prague" – and I finished it in Maine, summer, '85, and continued to write stories with Frog in it, and then the stories got longer and I had novella-length and novel-length stories, and that's how it was written. I never know how long a work is going to be when I start it, and I rarely know where it's going to go and what the structure of the work will be." (Sean Carroll, interview in Bookslut, December 2010.)
It's a separate question how well this works. Dixon has had an unusual number of negative reviews. According to Vince Pissarro,
"The run-on sentences, the rapid-fire but mundane stream of consciousness, the apparently frank but merely amphetamined dialogue that goes back and forth and back and forth within page after page of unbroken paragraphs that stretch as far as the eye can see: these devices are no longer energized by an author who has anything fresh to say... Exchanges like [that] are too easily achieved – too easily typed, even – and they're not challenging to the reader or to Dixon himself." [Vince Passaro, "S.A.S.E," New York Times, May 16, 1999.]
But this kind of criticism is too simple, and so is the complaint – common on Amazon and Goodreads – about Dixon's formlessness and endlessness. His narrators are compulsive, and so is the implied author, who writes at speed. His signature style, which omits particles, verbs, punctuation, and prepositions, is a direct effect of his frantic frame of mind: Write! Think! Publish! Don't stop! And when that frame of mind is applied to the dissolution of memories, as it is in Frog, the result can be intensely expressive. It has the irritability of some Alzheimer's patients, and the everyday anxiety of any middle-aged person trying to make sense of her unraveling life.
Want to read
January 12, 2013PW blurb:
"The author of five well-reviewed but relatively obscure novels and eight story collections, Dixon may achieve a higher profile with this novel, a National Book Award finalist. Opening portentously with the protagonist's trip to Kafka's grave, this 860-page Joycean monolith deftly portrays the urban nightmare as cosmic comedy, though some readers will doubtless be put off by chapter-length paragraphs, free association, time shifts and voice changes. Howard Tetch, angst-ridden college professor, had an old nanny who smeared his face with excrement as a boy; now he has violent outbursts toward his own daughters and fantasizes his wife's death. His Dublin is Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn. With a fine sense of the absurd, Dixon tells dozens of stories--how Howard's father, a dentist, went to prison; the tragic decline of Howard's suicidal, invalid sister, Vera; his violent adolescent street life; the apparent death at sea of his newsman brother, Alex. Then Dixon mixes the deck, giving alternative, mutually exclusive versions of some subplots, as if the world were splitting into parallel universes before our eyes. Readers attuned to the author's run-on style may warm to a cunning, sexy, audacious performance; others will find this an arty bore."
"The author of five well-reviewed but relatively obscure novels and eight story collections, Dixon may achieve a higher profile with this novel, a National Book Award finalist. Opening portentously with the protagonist's trip to Kafka's grave, this 860-page Joycean monolith deftly portrays the urban nightmare as cosmic comedy, though some readers will doubtless be put off by chapter-length paragraphs, free association, time shifts and voice changes. Howard Tetch, angst-ridden college professor, had an old nanny who smeared his face with excrement as a boy; now he has violent outbursts toward his own daughters and fantasizes his wife's death. His Dublin is Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn. With a fine sense of the absurd, Dixon tells dozens of stories--how Howard's father, a dentist, went to prison; the tragic decline of Howard's suicidal, invalid sister, Vera; his violent adolescent street life; the apparent death at sea of his newsman brother, Alex. Then Dixon mixes the deck, giving alternative, mutually exclusive versions of some subplots, as if the world were splitting into parallel universes before our eyes. Readers attuned to the author's run-on style may warm to a cunning, sexy, audacious performance; others will find this an arty bore."
December 6, 2015
Love is lost. Life is ruined. Nothing is left but memories and fantasies. But memories are dim and fantasies are bleak. The past starts branching and the reality ramifies.
“Sometimes things you can never understand destroy you.”
Too often Stephen Dixon becomes prolix and then he goes nowhere but is just running on the spot. Frog somewhat reminds of the novels by Saul Bellow but it is plainer in language and poorer in ideas and also Stephen Dixon tends to be too self-centered and too self-pitying.
“Sometimes things you can never understand destroy you.”
Too often Stephen Dixon becomes prolix and then he goes nowhere but is just running on the spot. Frog somewhat reminds of the novels by Saul Bellow but it is plainer in language and poorer in ideas and also Stephen Dixon tends to be too self-centered and too self-pitying.
February 12, 2008
Very stream of conscious with a zillion different alternative endings, subplots, narratives, and voices. At first the constantly changing direction of the story annoyed the pants off me, then I became fond of the flow and of how one character could become so many different beings with the same core values. It reminded me of T.S. Eliots poems "The Four Quartets" in which there is one Now but many different possibilities in this now. Brilliant.
September 7, 2025
Well I can’t say I loved this. The main character was obnoxious in many of the scenarios throughout the book and because it is all focused on him and his behavior you can’t escape his neurotic, selfish, sex obsessed thoughts and actions. But the writing is decent and in some cases even enjoyable. So make of that what you will. The book definitely didn’t need to be 750 pages. Also, Spoiler: there are no frogs in this book.
January 14, 2010
I made it about 10 pages into this piece and closed it for good. Dixon's stream of consciousness style does not play well with my tastes.
My impression: I had bacon today. No, wait, I had bacon yesterday. I mean I've had bacon sometime in my life with a pretty girl. I've kissed your mom while eating bacon. I mean I've seen a mom eat bacon and I've wanted to kiss her. Wait, what? Huh? I like bacon. Mom, will you please cook me some bacon?
My impression: I had bacon today. No, wait, I had bacon yesterday. I mean I've had bacon sometime in my life with a pretty girl. I've kissed your mom while eating bacon. I mean I've seen a mom eat bacon and I've wanted to kiss her. Wait, what? Huh? I like bacon. Mom, will you please cook me some bacon?
February 28, 2010
Rarely have I been so conflicted about a novel, and the last time I can recall was with the equally long-winded (and yet somehow fittingly so) Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.
Frog is less of a narrative then it is a brainstorm of possibilities. What COULD the narrative have been given a more or less static set of behaviors and past experiences for the protagonist Howard. Each chapter takes a time period in his life or focuses on a relationship in his life (familial/romantic/etc), occasionally overlapping with events from previous chapters. But on occasion some of the events contradict those of the past, leaving the reader with a feeling of uncertainty about what they have just read. One chapter is twenty-thirty revisions of one simple event of going downstairs and hearing a conversation between two men. One chapter goes all meta and a characters comments on how the Howard of that chapter (a man in his late 40s, early 50s) is completely different from a younger Howard from a different chapter with the impression that he's talking about more the changes one experiences growing up.
For a book so meticulously loquacious, I want to believe there is a reason for the contradiction and the repetition. If a straightforward narrative was not Dixon's intention, then what? A clue comes in the repetitive chapters where the reader gets to see Howard, a writer, in his creative process. This one chapter, I feel, underscores the entire text, examining all the possibilities, of who someone could be, and what would happen if they did such and such. And because the character of Howard is so static, with his obnoxious second-guessing logorhea, Dixon's own firm belief on Howard's identity, that the novel makes me think of Howard as less of a character than as a representation as any one of the books readers, someone with a set personality whose life could takes a multitude of shapes depending on the choices one makes. In this we Dixon's novel-come-thesis on personal identity is anchored to personality tendencies.
The possibilities and quandaries of the text often reward the reader with their profundity. But like with so many long-winded works before it (the afore-mentioned Infinite Jest, Rushdie's Midnight's Children) I wonder if the means are justified by the ends. Namely I found myself frustrated with the structure of the novel, and often downright bored with it.
On the other hand, as a source of esoteric investigation for the budding writer, Frog supplies a wealth of examination of the writing process, and a good argument of character solidification through Howard. For teachers of writing especially, several chapters rendered unbearable by their repetition when reading solely for pleasure, gain value, such Frog Goes Downstairs. I can see this chapter and others used as assigned readings for developing writers to discover the possibilities open to them with fiction, the benefit of revision and taking risks with a character you feel you know.
So as someone aspiring to be an author himself, I find this novel fascinating. As a piece of literature I would recommend to me friends? I'm not so sure their is anything thing other than academic exersize cleverly disguised as fiction.
Frog is less of a narrative then it is a brainstorm of possibilities. What COULD the narrative have been given a more or less static set of behaviors and past experiences for the protagonist Howard. Each chapter takes a time period in his life or focuses on a relationship in his life (familial/romantic/etc), occasionally overlapping with events from previous chapters. But on occasion some of the events contradict those of the past, leaving the reader with a feeling of uncertainty about what they have just read. One chapter is twenty-thirty revisions of one simple event of going downstairs and hearing a conversation between two men. One chapter goes all meta and a characters comments on how the Howard of that chapter (a man in his late 40s, early 50s) is completely different from a younger Howard from a different chapter with the impression that he's talking about more the changes one experiences growing up.
For a book so meticulously loquacious, I want to believe there is a reason for the contradiction and the repetition. If a straightforward narrative was not Dixon's intention, then what? A clue comes in the repetitive chapters where the reader gets to see Howard, a writer, in his creative process. This one chapter, I feel, underscores the entire text, examining all the possibilities, of who someone could be, and what would happen if they did such and such. And because the character of Howard is so static, with his obnoxious second-guessing logorhea, Dixon's own firm belief on Howard's identity, that the novel makes me think of Howard as less of a character than as a representation as any one of the books readers, someone with a set personality whose life could takes a multitude of shapes depending on the choices one makes. In this we Dixon's novel-come-thesis on personal identity is anchored to personality tendencies.
The possibilities and quandaries of the text often reward the reader with their profundity. But like with so many long-winded works before it (the afore-mentioned Infinite Jest, Rushdie's Midnight's Children) I wonder if the means are justified by the ends. Namely I found myself frustrated with the structure of the novel, and often downright bored with it.
On the other hand, as a source of esoteric investigation for the budding writer, Frog supplies a wealth of examination of the writing process, and a good argument of character solidification through Howard. For teachers of writing especially, several chapters rendered unbearable by their repetition when reading solely for pleasure, gain value, such Frog Goes Downstairs. I can see this chapter and others used as assigned readings for developing writers to discover the possibilities open to them with fiction, the benefit of revision and taking risks with a character you feel you know.
So as someone aspiring to be an author himself, I find this novel fascinating. As a piece of literature I would recommend to me friends? I'm not so sure their is anything thing other than academic exersize cleverly disguised as fiction.
August 7, 2025
Torn between 3 and 4 stars - I enjoyed this but I feel there are considerably better books I would rate at a 4. Can't say I recommend reading this as it's about 770 pages of monotony from the perspective of a massive freak. That's right up my alley but it does get old. I was convinced this would be 4 stars until the second half of the final chapter, wherein the word "Frog" is used for the first time, and that frustrated me. I enjoyed the last bit of the penultimate chapter, in which our main character revives all his dead family members to tell him about his flaws Christmas Carol style. There's stuff to appreciate here but probably not worth your time.
wish-list
November 13, 2019Stephen Dixon, novelist and retired Johns Hopkins writing professor, dies at 83
https://www.baltimoresun.com/obituari...
[Blessed be.]
https://www.baltimoresun.com/obituari...
[Blessed be.]
March 16, 2022
I wonder if the publisher of this novel (Owl Books) didn’t choose to make it fat and squat in order to approximate the squattiness of a toad or a frog. There’s no real reason that a near-800-page book can’t be slimmer and more portable, so I assume its awkward, bricklike shape is by design. As a result, this book has been a prominent item on my bookshelves for almost eight years, after I bought it impulsively in 2014 at a used-book store in Durham, NC. Frog endured a trip to the UK, where it sat unread for five years, then came back to the States where it sat for three years: in each locale (country, bookshelf) it continued to appeal to me with its large, fractured-font, single-syllable spine title, readable from across the room.
The book was more and less than I expected, having only a vague sense that it would be, by virtue of its size and nomination for an NBA, a book of some gravitas and literary distinction. The gravitas in this book depends on a reader’s willingness to grant its strange shape and odd narrative voice a fair hearing/reading. The book is composed of interconnected short stories and novellas that feature a cast of common characters, principally Howard Tetch, the author’s proxy. Some of the “chapters” and some of the scenes within those chapters offer up alternative versions of events/facts as we come to know them, and ultimately the reader has to ask herself why it is that one version somehow assumes primacy as the “real” version. One chapter that is overtly suppositional has the entire Tetch family participating in a Holocaust evacuation during the second world war; a large section of the chapter called “Frog Fragments” is the physical reappearance of characters that have died; another chapter has Howard frantically searching for his five-year-old daughter who has disappeared forever from the lake when he went swimming; and another has both daughters fully grown, musing on the effect their father’s (Tetch’s) early death had on them.
Mostly, though, the story of Howard Tetch entails his birth family (dentist father who spends a few years in jail for bribing city inspectors, a former beauty queen mother, an older brother who isolates himself in Alaska, the middle brother who dies when the freighter he sails on is lost at sea, and a younger sister whose off-and-on fibrocystic cancer whittles her away to nothing by age 25) and his married family (his wife Denise who comes to suffer an unexplained wasting disease and his daughters Olivia and Eva). There are also numerous accounts of various other women that Howard has or attempts to have relations with, before his marriage and after Denise’s death (which may or may not actually happen). Howard, like the author, is a writer of published fiction that garners little attention and few sales, forcing him to submit each new work to a different publisher. Howard’s method is to write daily, even just a page, and it’s all a matter of spitballing the first good line that comes to him.
What’s most characteristic of the entire novel is the narrative voice, convoluted and colloquial, every statement qualified and then further qualified, not so much burnished as muffled and muddled. The dialogues between Howard and any of his family, friends, or lovers reveal a man incapable of articulating himself simply. Part of it is a compulsion to explain and make clear to himself as well as to his interlocutor. There’s both humor and frustration in this method, for his companions and for the reader. In general, however, the riffing in the conversations is like the story-telling itself, an attempt to make things sound right, even if they’re lies. In all of this, there is an earnestness to get things right, and I found myself both enjoying and sympathizing with Howard’s ongoing plight. He’s not always an easy person to be with, and his bouts of self-opprobrium are more a tic than any sort of attempt at self-reform, but he is still able to express what seems a genuine concern and affection for those around him.
It’s odd to take to heart a character that is so clearly a product of one revision after another—ie, is a shifting fictional construct—but Stephen Dixon’s wavering/waffling portrayal of Howard Tetch’s abstruse mental terrain leaves a lasting impression of a character who is only a slight remove from the author himself, a man intent on getting down his thoughts, in the process improving himself. Frog is akin to auto-fiction, reality slightly altered in the telling, but with the emotions and relations essentially preserved. There’s an earnest core to the novel, but there’s also a great deal of humor, and it makes this long, rambling novel a pleasure to read. And, finally: the title…? There’s no mention of a Frog or any reason to associate the principal character, writer/teacher/family man, Howard Tetch, with the sobriquet until the book’s final 10 pages. In this closing vignette, there’s a brilliant portrayal of a family car trip to Maine from NYC that becomes emblematic of the novel and the character. Intent on reaching Maine and fulfilling a series of planned-for events, Howard is reluctant after two hours on the road to acknowledge the failure of any stop-gap method to save the family’s pet turtle, Frog, which had been accidentally left behind in their NYC apartment. Yet, while having it on record that he is fighting every instinct in his body, he capitulates and turns the car around, toppling all his formulations for the day’s events. It is the novel’s final daffy revelation: Dixon’s totemic self-identification as the innocuous, hapless, slow-moving reptile…
The book was more and less than I expected, having only a vague sense that it would be, by virtue of its size and nomination for an NBA, a book of some gravitas and literary distinction. The gravitas in this book depends on a reader’s willingness to grant its strange shape and odd narrative voice a fair hearing/reading. The book is composed of interconnected short stories and novellas that feature a cast of common characters, principally Howard Tetch, the author’s proxy. Some of the “chapters” and some of the scenes within those chapters offer up alternative versions of events/facts as we come to know them, and ultimately the reader has to ask herself why it is that one version somehow assumes primacy as the “real” version. One chapter that is overtly suppositional has the entire Tetch family participating in a Holocaust evacuation during the second world war; a large section of the chapter called “Frog Fragments” is the physical reappearance of characters that have died; another chapter has Howard frantically searching for his five-year-old daughter who has disappeared forever from the lake when he went swimming; and another has both daughters fully grown, musing on the effect their father’s (Tetch’s) early death had on them.
Mostly, though, the story of Howard Tetch entails his birth family (dentist father who spends a few years in jail for bribing city inspectors, a former beauty queen mother, an older brother who isolates himself in Alaska, the middle brother who dies when the freighter he sails on is lost at sea, and a younger sister whose off-and-on fibrocystic cancer whittles her away to nothing by age 25) and his married family (his wife Denise who comes to suffer an unexplained wasting disease and his daughters Olivia and Eva). There are also numerous accounts of various other women that Howard has or attempts to have relations with, before his marriage and after Denise’s death (which may or may not actually happen). Howard, like the author, is a writer of published fiction that garners little attention and few sales, forcing him to submit each new work to a different publisher. Howard’s method is to write daily, even just a page, and it’s all a matter of spitballing the first good line that comes to him.
What’s most characteristic of the entire novel is the narrative voice, convoluted and colloquial, every statement qualified and then further qualified, not so much burnished as muffled and muddled. The dialogues between Howard and any of his family, friends, or lovers reveal a man incapable of articulating himself simply. Part of it is a compulsion to explain and make clear to himself as well as to his interlocutor. There’s both humor and frustration in this method, for his companions and for the reader. In general, however, the riffing in the conversations is like the story-telling itself, an attempt to make things sound right, even if they’re lies. In all of this, there is an earnestness to get things right, and I found myself both enjoying and sympathizing with Howard’s ongoing plight. He’s not always an easy person to be with, and his bouts of self-opprobrium are more a tic than any sort of attempt at self-reform, but he is still able to express what seems a genuine concern and affection for those around him.
It’s odd to take to heart a character that is so clearly a product of one revision after another—ie, is a shifting fictional construct—but Stephen Dixon’s wavering/waffling portrayal of Howard Tetch’s abstruse mental terrain leaves a lasting impression of a character who is only a slight remove from the author himself, a man intent on getting down his thoughts, in the process improving himself. Frog is akin to auto-fiction, reality slightly altered in the telling, but with the emotions and relations essentially preserved. There’s an earnest core to the novel, but there’s also a great deal of humor, and it makes this long, rambling novel a pleasure to read. And, finally: the title…? There’s no mention of a Frog or any reason to associate the principal character, writer/teacher/family man, Howard Tetch, with the sobriquet until the book’s final 10 pages. In this closing vignette, there’s a brilliant portrayal of a family car trip to Maine from NYC that becomes emblematic of the novel and the character. Intent on reaching Maine and fulfilling a series of planned-for events, Howard is reluctant after two hours on the road to acknowledge the failure of any stop-gap method to save the family’s pet turtle, Frog, which had been accidentally left behind in their NYC apartment. Yet, while having it on record that he is fighting every instinct in his body, he capitulates and turns the car around, toppling all his formulations for the day’s events. It is the novel’s final daffy revelation: Dixon’s totemic self-identification as the innocuous, hapless, slow-moving reptile…
May 21, 2022
Howard Tetch is a vibe. And Stephen Dixon is most certainly a writer's writer's writer's writer. Meaning that perhaps only .0001% of the present American reading population in 2022 will actually give a damn about Dixon's "hero" -- former radio man, writer, teacher, father, et al. -- these days. But for the rest of us, this is an intoxicating whirl of consciousness and life that is unapologetically long and digressive. What are we to make of the chapter in which Tetch's family has been transplanted onto what appears to be a train heading to a Nazi concentration camp? Or the one in which Tetch's daughter disappears and nobody seems to remember her? Or Tetch dying and returning in some ghost form to his daughter? These are the types of cheap postmodern tricks that usually annoy me, but Dixon manages to sell it in large part because of his fulsome commitment. What starts off as funny vignettes eventually transforms into neverending novellas, meditations on the other people in Tetch's life (including his mother, his sister, his brother, and many others). Which suggests a form of fictionalized autofiction well before Knaussgaard was even known or fashionable and a far more successful and legitimate masterpiece. But only for the .0001%. Only for the "elite" readers who still care about the joys of everyday life and all of its embarrassments (and there are many embarrassing moments here!). This nearly 800 page novel will probably annoy most readers. But I found it a joy to read during the last two weeks.
July 23, 2012
If you were not a neurotic person before reading this book, you will be afterwards. Darn it if you don't feel like you know the protagonist better than your own brother by the end of the near 800 pages though.
August 29, 2010
Absolutely brilliant!
My favorite book by my favorite American author.
My favorite book by my favorite American author.
October 5, 2009
This book is incredible.
January 8, 2015
Read about half of this book. Didn't get any better...nothing else happens...didn't get any better...nothing else happens...didn't get any better...you get the idea.
February 8, 2016
Do authors still write career defining novels. Probably not. Frog is Dixon at his best. Stories upon stories. Modern novels aren't dead, they just aren't written by Stephen King
Read
October 18, 2024Crucial moment occurs on the connecticut turnpike en route to maine from nyc
July 22, 2025
Frog a this fat brick's title. It looked like the book that would choke me to death. I have outlived cult writer Stephen Dixon's big gulp.
August 13, 2007
I cringe to even give this book a second star. I struggled to get through it, paragraphs 30 pages long, stilted dialog, endless variations of the same event. Every time I opened it I was tempted to give up, or skip a few hundred pages. But then something would come along, some moment of brutal, simple honesty that rang so true and I'd keep reading on, hoping to see it again. I made it through to the end, but I'm still not sure I wouldn't rather have that week back.
September 10, 2016
As in Cortazar's Hopscotch, the reader could open this book up at any point in the narrative and after getting through 769 pages in any order, one could understand the psychological traumas of Howard and the traumas he imposes on those around him. As mentally real and detail oriented as Nicholson Baker, Dixon gives us the lies, delusions and realities of his character that is funny, makes you pissed off and is sad throughout. Howard won't take no for an answer.
July 13, 2012
Somewhere in this 700+ page book I got lost and never seemed to find my way out again. Good luck
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews