The Tale of Talisman : In these novels, extravagant storytelling confronts betrayal, dispels the blues and names a father’s fears : INTERSTATE, <i> By Stephen Dixon (Henry Holt: $25; 374 pp.)</i>

This remarkable new novel is being hailed by its publisher as “experimental” in form, which is likely to put you off, as it should, since an investment of $25 and several hours worth of serious reading time should entitle you to something more than an experiment. You shouldn’t be put off, though, for in this, his 17th book, Dixon has honed his radical techniques to their finest sheen.

“Interstate” is composed of eight distinct narratives about reactions to a senseless shooting on a highway in which a child is killed. The narratives examine the tragedy from various angles, from the frantic search for a hospital to a scene before the shooting where the father of the murdered child lectures her on safety in the modern urban jungle. Each narrative picks up on an idea touched on somewhere in another and expands on it. An interstate, my Oxford American Dictionary says, is something “existing or carried on between states” and “a road on the highway system that links states of the U.S.” Dixon’s “Interstate” is about emotions carried on between different states of mind and the strands of unconscious dread that link those states.

In fact, dread may be precisely what “Interstate” is about. In an amazing first chapter, Dixon explores the consequences of the father’s inability to move beyond his daughter’s death. He becomes a kind of suburban Mad Max, roaming the interstates in a frenzied search for the man who fired the fatal shot. His job, his marriage, even his relationship with his remaining daughter, are jettisoned in his pursuit of revenge. But when it comes it proves not to be an end but the beginning of a descent into limbo.

The art of Dixon’s technique is in the way he compels careful rereading. The further along you get into “Interstate,” the more you realize you’re not simply looking at the story from different perspectives, you’re looking at slightly different stories (Dixon will send you scrambling back to an earlier chapter to check certain vivid details against your memory). There is the intriguing possibility that the narrator, in recounting the story, can’t recall all the details himself and keeps changing its landscape slightly. There is also the even more intriguing possibility that each narrative is simply a blueprint of the father’s subconscious fears for his children and his own helplessness to protect them in the outside world.

In one scene, the daughter doesn’t die on the interstate but in a hospital where her last thought is “If Daddy doesn’t believe I’m living, I’m dead.” Read another way, the line could mean that the father’s innermost terror is that a simple lapse, an unguarded moment, will invite disaster.

The final segment even suggests that the entire novel may all be a fevered reaction triggered by a before-bedtime crooning of “My Darling Clementine.” (The simple line “You are lost and gone forever” echoes throughout the book with an achingly beautiful resonance.) In the hands of a lesser writer the possibility that the girl’s death was all along imagined would be a gimmick for letting the reader down gently, but for Dixon it offers a final, unique perspective from which to consider the possibilities of love and loss. The final chapter has the cathartic power of a release from hell.

Dixon’s prose has a deliberately flat, hypnotic tone to it--”He’s in the car with two kids, driving on an interstate, when a car pulls up . . . “ and “He gets a job and about three months later is on his way to work”--that is both soothingly dreamlike and hideously realistic. The more the father generalizes on his collected fears for his children, the more sharply they come into focus. The psychotic shooter of the opening scene later appears to be the living embodiment of his fears about modern society--the killer (he tells police) is “White, black, a mix maybe, but definitely not an Oriental, but I shouldn’t be sure of that . . . but druggies I’m almost always sure of.”

In the end, every parent will understand the truth of the line “If Daddy doesn’t believe I’m living, I’m dead,” though we don’t necessarily know whether it’s the dying girl’s thought or one projected onto her by a distraught father. It’s also a perfect metaphor for the artist and his creation.