His Wife Leaves Him

by Stephen Dixon

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.

Genres: Fiction, Literature, Novels, American, Literary Fiction

407 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Stephen 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.

Reviews

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

This review may end up being a terribly out-of-character review ; personal. That may also be the reason why this review does not get written.

*

His Wife Leaves Him is Stephen Dixon’s newest novel, and my first from him. Dixon has written sixteen novels and published fifteen collections of short stories ;; something like 500+ stories in total. Yet his most rated novel on goodreads is I., most read perhaps because McSweeney’s published it. His obscurity is emphasized by the fact that his latest novel was published by Alexander Theroux’s current publisher, Fantagraphics. I will be reading more Dixon.

*

Personal? How? Well, this is a book about a man named Martin. His wife Gwen dies of a series of strokes. She’s gone. He is left. His story, their story, the story of their life together, takes place in Martin’s memory as he lies in bed, sleeping or not, after a memorial service for her. Martin is ordinary, hoch-ordinary ;; no hero, no anti-hero ; an ordinary husband. He is a writer of fiction, she a Camus scholar; they have two daughters. That’s really all there is, lying in bed remembering. I’ve never been there, lost a spouse. No, but I will. There will be two kinds of readers of His Wife Leaves Him :: the first will retrace the same path of recollection which Martin does, into the past ; the second will project into the inevitability of the future that moment at which His spouse leaves him. But, not two kinds of readers ;; really three, because this is a gendered novel; it is a male novel; not manly and masculine, but simply male ; female readers will experience and judge Martin differently. But for men (I took a course in men’s studies when in college) Martin’s life will put one into the position of either recall or projection, to that time when one’s That=Without=Which will have left him. Existence will be vacuous, with only the perturbations of memory to fill what will only be void ;; it will hurt, even as the anxiety of its eventuality already hurts.

*

His Wife Leaves Him may suffer The Holden Caulfield Syndrome. Although it is not a first person narrative, but rather a hyper-limited third person, the only thing we get directly is Martin; what we get is the best he can do recalling what he can recall. I trust his memory -- he relates a fight he had with his wife (no perfect husband, he; why it hurts) but doesn’t recall ; his daughter tells him about it years later ; but he can’t recall the fight itself, only his daughter’s telling. The inaccuracy of memory is reflected as Martin employs a form of imaginative variation in order to determine what the truth of the matter may have been ; or he employs a subjunctive mood to better understand what had in fact taken place. But so much time in the head of Martin will weary the average novel reader who wants action-action. He convinces me as a reliable narrator because his short-comings are the very stuff of his narrative ; his experience is the experience itself of having nothing left but vaporous memory.

*

Prose -- I nearly choked, stumbled, and stopped within the first few paragraphs. No flights of beauty. I was immediately disappointed and wondered what I’d gotten myself into, having shelved already six of Dixon’s books. I was certain that Here was the next prose guy. Sentences didn’t sing ; prepositions stubbed my readerly toes. Ouch! What? But now, and even after a few pages of working into and through what was about to be going on, I’m asking, Is this Dixon writing? is it his prose? or is this all Martin? I don’t know. Whose voice here? To credit, there are few to no cliches ; not incompetency. Rather, it would seem that the prose is proposed only so far as it needs to be to get the job done which needs to get done. Martin is a clumsy thinker and clumsy talker ; and while the text is not exactly clumsy, don’t come here looking for Gass or Theroux. It is not a book proud of the words on the page, but proud of having rendered the consciousness of a hoch-ordinary man. And half of us are also hoch-ordinary men.

*

So forced into the comparison by the centrality of memory ;; Dixon is a twenty-first century Proust, not a recapitulation of Proust as he was, but maybe as he would be in our post-war literature. His Wife Leaves Him can be compared to Proust as contrast, not as equation. One can no longer write Proustian sentences ; only Proust could. But writing today, one writes also in the shadow of those two streams of post-war american fiction -- the postmodern and the realist. I suspect Dixon owes some to each ; but perhaps more to the later, although I do not read them; the Carvers and the Updikes and the Roths; and from my own reading I felt a recall of Frederick Barthelme. But still, there is enough of the metafictional in it to hold my interest ; albeit all fiction is meta-. And too like Proust, this novel tempts the reader to insert the author into the role of protagonist, an error also perpetrated upon Salinger’s novel. Yes, Dixon is all over the novel ; he must be Martin. But no matter ; Martin is also me.

*

Another tedious personal statement :: His Wife Leaves Him could have been one of my four-star’d books. But it was, in the end, too affective for that dismissal. In truth, perhaps, most of my five-star’d books are six=plus stars, rated on a ten=star scale without half stars. I know how bad books can get ;; I don’t read them. Novels I love, novels I read, I know are five=plus stars ; but I’m provided with only half the number I need.

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

After one or two false starts I started feeling the sensitivity and deep emotion of this and began cruising, thinking it one of his best and enjoying the structure – a man in bed thinking and dreaming about his newly dead wife – which for one of the first times made a Dixon novel read like an actual novel (distantly akin to Finnegans Wake perhaps), rather than a collection of stories; but then I hit the last section, which is just a seemingly random collection of memories, that did not quite feel like the organic output of a man in bed, thoughts and memories coming to him from the elsewhere beyond, and more like a writer intentionally jotting notes, and my interest wavered and I didn’t want to read it when I woke up and started reading other things, though I will soldier on and finish it, though for now I consider it read.

Aside: The book rhymed strangely with one of the most popular Super Bowl LIV commercials: an old man talking to Google about his dead wife as Google commits it all to memory. I found it exceedingly creepy and disturbing – imagining a sad old man talking to his computer because he’s so alone, or a sad old man with incipient Alzheimer’s talking to his computer because he’s so alone and losing the company of even his memories - the Google team twisting this disturbing image of mine into something touching and positive and drippingly sappy.

[Melissa Hood · Rating 1 out of 5]

You know how incredibly boring it is to listen to other people's dreams? I couldn't get past the first 50 pages of which most are spent recounting dreams over the course of one night. I am an avid reader of many different genres, but this book was....there are no words. 'Impossible' might be fitting.

[Norman Birnbach · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was interested in Dixon because I had heard he was a "writer's writer" -- someone who other literary writers admired even if he didn't have a big audience like a John Updike or Philip Roth, for example. I read "14 Stories," and found them interesting but not great. So I figured it must be me so I picked up another collection of short stories, "Late Stories," and this novel. I'm still working through "Late Stories," which I like and finished "His Wife Leaves Him."

Both the collection and this novel cover the same territory: an elderly man whose wife has recently died. Both capture details and disclose insights about aging and its effects on a long-married couple. The characters are different, however much they and their circumstances resemble each other.

"His Wife Leaves Him" provides a third-person stream-of-consciousness that is remarkable as it jumps around to tell Martin's story and his life before, during and after Gwen. (This is not a spoiler -- remember: the novel is called "His Wife Leaves Him.") In a sense, it reminded me of "Our Town" because as Martin tries to remember various incidents (some big, some small) in his life with Gwen, he comes to the realization that he didn't necessarily value the happy moments enough, that he took aspects of their life for granted only now when they're no longer together.

As for plot, there isn't one. Most of the novel takes place while Martin is in bed, restless, awake or asleep, recalling various aspects of his life together with Gwen. The challenge is that there are no chapter breaks, rarely any paragraph breaks -- probably only a dozen across a 407-page book -- and no white space. You get your money's worth, from that perspective. And because the narrative reflects Martin's jumbled stream-of-consciousness, the incidents he recalls jump around a lot. He might go from the first time meeting Gwen to their wedding back to the second date then to a story about a woman he dated before he met Gwen, all in the same paragraph (remember: they rarely end), and you just have to be alert to the time shifts.

Martin himself is mostly an unlikeable character. He can lose his temper and be cruel in his relationships with everyone including Gwen, their daughters, even Gwen's mother though not his own mother. And also he belabors a lot about the early days of his relationship with Gwen: when he called her, his thoughts agonizing about when to call and what to say. He's also an unreliable narrator (even though it's told in third person); the character realizes he can't remember certain details, and he tries out certain details to see if that sounds right if that's the likely way events happened -- and then, later in the novel, we get a different take on the events. And it's hard to know which is accurate. In some cases, perhaps neither version or something in between.

I did find it challenging to get through but am pleased I made it through. The novel does provide a real sense of what Martin's and Gwen's life was like. It was depressing -- which one would expect from the title alone. But there were enough from their life together that was uplifting. From a story telling perspective, there were some interesting challenges for Dixon: we know his wife leaves but because we know upfront that they were in a long-term marriage, Dixon still found ways to raise the stakes when Martin revisits their early courtship days. Ultimately, I did want to understand why they got together, why they stayed together and how he was impacted afterwards.

[Lee B · Rating 1 out of 5]

I've never hated a main character faster than I hated this old man. You'd think this book was hot goss on a struggling marriage through time, but nope!

He purposefully neglects, belittles, and SA's his medically impaired wife after she has multiple strokes. At one point he admits to trying to hurt her while giving her a massage, squeezing as hard as he could until she had to beg him to stop. He screams that he wishes she would just die already, and she dies of what is implied to be heartbreak that very night.

That's right, she doesn't leave him at all, she just dies.

He lies to and gaslights both of their daughters about her final wishes right after that, just because he can. She wanted her body to be cremated and scattered under a willow tree in her beloved garden, which she told her oldest daughter and him, but he had her remains donated to science instead. He mentions his dick dozens of times in the first 30 pages.

I couldn't make it past page 50, this book is painfully dreadful.

[Alec Berry · Rating 4 out of 5]

His Wife Leaves Him narrows in on small moments and blows them out into their own universes, and it really demands you take a seat in them. There’s a lot of stops and starts, trying to get the memories correct, tangents, weird dialogue that makes every character sound like a telephone receptionist, old people sex, and gooey, gooey love eyes, but above all that are these long, very long paragraphs (pages and pages and pages of the same paragraph) until those paragraphs grow short and the variety of the text expands. That’s the good stuff. All those paragraphs, I should say. That attention to framing the story in such a way is why it’s worth reading.

https://alecreadscomics.com/2020/05/1...

[Rachelle Banuelos]

HUHHHHHHHHHHHHH 😭😵‍💫
I’m sorry but maybe it’s me and maybe I’m slow but I genuinely did not understand a SINGLE word of what I just read.
Now to be fair, earlier in the day I did partake in some adult snacks 🍃 so at first I was like “okay Rachelle maybe this is on you.”
NOPE.
I sent this page to multiple sober adults and every single one of them was equally confused.
Whose POV was that??Am I him??Is he me??Are WE together??Am I the secretary??The wife??The classroom??The bicycle at the health club??
Why did I feel like I was having a stroke alongside the characters?? 😭
This book opened like someone transcribed an anxiety attack in real time.

[Lu · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book shows exactly the feeling of losing somebody and getting to live with the guilt of it every single day.

Such an emotional journey that shows how the ups and downs of depression travel to one’s body

[Lynne Lapin · Rating 2 out of 5]

When I began His Wife Leaves Him I was at first put off, and then intrigued, by the style of writing. Everything is thrown at the reader at a fast pace with no paragraph breaks. That part of the book works for me, as does the depiction of mixed feelings about taking care of a handicapped family member. As the first chapter proceeds, we are introduced to Martin as more and more of a cruel and selfish man, which seems very believable. However, by chapter two I had enough of the memories of a man for whom I had no pity. He knew what he did was often very wrong, but continued acting badly and now wants to totally erase the subject of his guilt and in doing so causes further suffering on his daughters. He honors nothing, including the dying wishes of the wife he abused, which would have made him somewhat more sympathetic. I wouldn't want to spend 15 minutes stuck in line talking to this man, so seriously regret having spent hours reading his drivel.

I want to simply add that the problem is not that this was a action-less character novel; but it is that this was drawn out way too long. It would have worked as a short story for me. Among my favorite books are a few that focus almost exclusively on the character of one or two people with little or no action, such as Stoner by John Willams. I felt Stoner was a character worthy of its length, particularly in terms of its prose. Martin's depiction by Dixon just didn't draw me into the character or the writing style in the same way.

[Danielle · Rating 1 out of 5]

Someone do us all a favor and please wake this poor man up!

I too gave up on this book. I tried like other reviewers... It started out ok. Some grammar issues (pet peeve.. "I've got" grrr!) but there was structure, a plot, even a lead character with many flaws--what a horrible husband. Not sure of the right term to describe him, but he definitely wants people to think he's an amazing husband taking care of his sick wife but he's abusive and resentful and then of course remorseful. But then it crashed and burned for me. When Martin takes a nap, put the book down and never look back b/c there is nothing of value in the bazillion or so pages on his weird, creepy, meandering dreams and thoughts that went on and on almost like the writer had ADD (not a direct quote): ...Gwen and I met for coffee.. oh look there's the cat, he's been missing I wonder if I fed him. Gwen liked to be fed. So did Sharon. I hope the girls don't lock the cat in their room....Um, what?

I skimmed and skimmed hoping it would bounce back. And then I jumped to the end...Still nothing. Sigh. Maybe it's like another reviewer stated... that women won't get this book because it's told from a male perspective. Maybe it is meant just for men to "get it"? That would be an interesting analysis. That's all that's interesting about this book. You can add this woman to the ever growing list of ugh.. what the .. ?!?!

[Debbie]

Giving up on it 130 pages again. Beautifully written but can't sustain interests in one long dream

[Amy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I just couldn't do it. I wanted to finish but around 75 pages of dream sequence with only one paragraph break and no chapters I just had to put it down......strange read.

Moving on.

[Cynthia Robinson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I, too, found it un-finishable--there just was not enough of a thread (other than the narrator's self-centered doltishness, which--funnily enough--didn't make him 100% unlikeable) to carry me through. Like the majority of Dixon's work that I have read, the narrator is an older white male, a writer, with self-serving and at times frankly off-putting attitudes toward (almost always significantly younger) women. Still, the inside of the sorts of heads (no pun intended) he writes about, Dixon pulls off extraordinarily well, sometimes dipping a toe (or more than one) into stream-of-consciousness narration. What exact little actions or thoughts trigger memories and where the memories take him, this is all very well done, but several times (I made it about half-way through) I thought my Kindle was messing with me, or perhaps me with it, and looked to make sure I hadn't somehow been transported back to the beginning, but no...

Dixon's use of the dream conceit, though, is pretty masterful, gotta give him that.