Garbage

by Stephen Dixon

Shaney Fleet is the owner of a working-class bar, and his problem is garbage. When a private hauler tries to coerce Shaney into purchasing collection services, he resists. Soon no hauler will remove his black-listed trash, and garbage that is not even his own begins to appear at his front door. Ultimately, his apartment is torched, his head bashed in, and his bar closed by the health department. In this well-wrought parable of modern urban life, literal garbage becomes a metaphor for the petty encumbrances, bureaucratic entanglements, and apparently insoluble problems that surround Shaney. As in the works of Kafka and Beckett, the mood is at once ominously threatening and irrepressibly comic.

Genres: Fiction

165 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 1, 1988

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

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beleaguered bar owner refuses to capitulate to a racket threatening him to change his garbage provider. Less stylistically relentless than Dixon’s other works, Garbage is a pulsating and satisfying tale of a man not cowering to a violent and corrupt system.

[Demis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perfectly frustrating.

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

the 11th dixon book i’ve read

[Gigi · Rating 4 out of 5]

So great and well executed. Never goes too big, let's the very real absurdities speak for themselves and just cranks the strangeness up a little bit more so it's just right. Devoured this and want to read it again, in part just to see how much money Shaney gives people, including in free drinks, versus how much he takes in. The back of the book cites Chandler, Kafka, and Joyce as influences (I got Joyce in the ear for dialogue/dialect), and I think that's true, though in a more grounded American blue collar way, and I also really thought of Dostoevsky-- with so many characters on the fringes, Shaney Fleet walking among them, a working class Myshkin showing the absurdity if not impossibility of living "fairly" or "upright" or "honestly" in America, where the moral high ground is built on sinking foundations of trash and garage, the deeper you sink, the more it will cost you for the privilege. I think Dzanc has a ebook of this but let's get this back into print! It's too good not to be better known.

[Dogra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Petit chef d'oeuvre d'humour noir qui sur un rythme quasi infernal nous tourmente entre l'amusement et l'effroi...Un style unique, sans pause ni respiration. A lire d'une traite tant il est prenant!