Full disclosure: I’m afraid of heights. When, in Karen Outen’s debut novel, Dixon, Descending, the rickety aluminum bridge across the Khumbu Icefall shakes in the wind as protagonist Dixon Bryant climbs Everest, I shook, too, and gripped the arms of my desk chair a little tighter. That quality of prose carried me through even when this story of a Black man who upends his life in order to conquer the world’s tallest mountain grew implausible.

Dixon is a good man leading a good life. As a school psychologist at an all-boys charter school, he helps young men survive the rigors of adolescence and become good men themselves. He is trying to be content being that good man, though he is somewhat haunted by having missed becoming an Olympic hurdler by two-tenths of a second. When his brother, Nate — who needs some outrageous accomplishment to reset his own life, which has become rudderless — pushes the idea of Everest into his head, Dixon decides that being the first Black American man to summit the top of the world will mean something.

The reader feels the tragedy in this decision long before the disastrous ending of the brothers’ quest is revealed, in part because Outen doesn’t withhold it until the end; the novel toggles back and forth between the climb and its aftermath so that we know long before the details of Nate’s death emerge that Dixon has returned alone. But the first tragedy — for me, at least — is that Dixon went on the expedition at all.

The chapters that deal with his life at school make clear that students at the Medgar Evers Charter Middle School Academy for Boys are lucky to have him. There is one in particular — goofy, chubby Marcus — who has found in Dr. Bryant a protector and role model that every 12-year-old wants but few of us ever got from our fathers. Marcus needs Dixon’s protection because he’s in the crosshairs of Shiloh, a troubled classmate who seems to be a truly incorrigible bully. We sense another tragedy waiting at home while Dixon is facing down Everest.

It is this domestic narrative that carries the novel. Dixon’s enthusiasm and affection for Marcus and his inability to see the neediness of Shiloh feel real and complex. Outen captures the energy of school hallways and the confusion of emotion and professional duty that everyone who works in a school wrestles with on a regular basis. In many ways, the tragedy that befalls Marcus and Shiloh feels more serious than the one that befalls Nate and Dixon, two brothers who can’t quite get out of each other’s way.

Of course, the Mt. Everest story is the symbolic heart of the book. Can you ever climb over your greatest obstacles? Can you reach inside and find the strength and fortitude, that extra gear (to use the metaphor Dixon applies to his Olympic trial) to face the difficult task of becoming your best self? And when you’ve failed, when a challenge has broken and battered you physically and emotionally, how do you get past it? How do you find the strength to keep putting one foot in front of the other?

Outen creates a vivid portrait of the climb, full of locations and terms that make the characters sound like devoted mountaineers. But despite the Hillary Step, the Khumbu Icefall, and the Thyangboche Monastery; despite the Western Cwm, the Geneva Spur, and the Lhotse Face; despite the goggles and the safety lines and the harness belts that must be run through buckles twice to avoid slipping; despite the chorten, the nifedipine, and the dexamethasone, there remains something unreal about this trip.

Perhaps it’s unfair to question an author’s central premise, but I could not convince myself that Dixon Bryant, a divorced, mid-career school psychologist with a child in college, would take a leave of absence and plop down $65,000+ for an adventure like this. Ironically, part of the problem is that Outen has made him too real. He is a responsible adult, committed to his work, largely rational in his response to the world. We see him dedicate himself to loving Marcus, then rededicate himself to understanding Shiloh. We see that he is a role model for his daughter, his brother, and his cousin.

In the end, I believed that the journey to Everest and back could damage him as severely as it does here. What I couldn’t believe was that he would’ve gone on it in the first place.

John P. Loonam has a Ph.D. in American literature from the City University of New York and taught English in New York City public schools for over 35 years. He has published fiction in various journals and anthologies, and his short plays have been featured by the Mottola Theater Project several times. He is married and the father of two sons; the four have lived in Brooklyn long enough to be considered natives by anyone but his neighbors.

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