Haircut today. Another half-hour with Beth, the stylist, telling me tales of her sullen daughter, Phoebe, and her incontinent Chihuahua, Norman (a depressed and depressing little rescue dog who sleeps curled up in a mouse-colored bed near the shampoo station). Another half-hour of struggling to make small talk-something I do not do very well at all. A daily diary started by the narrator as a sort of orientation experiment, Notes, K. B. Dixon’s new novel, follows a single year in the life of obscure composer, photographer, and essayist David Bacon. It offers a compact and comic look at both his world and the world around him. Here in elliptic notes is a snapshot of Bacon’s wife, Emily; his perpetually fearful neighbor, Mrs. Hampton; and his continuing struggle with a recalcitrant composition tentatively titled The Coward’s Quartet. Here in black and white is the documentary evidence with which one might-if so inclined-confront a conveniently unreliable memory.