Going to ‘The Dogs’
Original book essay, 3/24/99
The Dogs: A Modern Bestiary
by Rebecca Brown
City Lights Books, $10.95 (paperback)
First, the behind-the-scenes stuff you might remember from a few months back: Seattle author Rebecca Brown made the highly acclaimed The Gifts of the Body, a slightly fictionalized memoir about her days as a volunteer caregiver to AIDS patients. Then, she got a healthy deal with HarperCollins for her next novel. Then, HarperCollins proprietor Rupert Murdoch ordered management to cut expenses, after the company vastly overspent on celebrity books (including one by Murdoch’s pal Newt Gingrich). Brown’s The Dogs was one of the titles dropped, after it had already been announced in company publicity documents. It finally came out months later from a smaller press, for a smaller advance.
But enough of that. Now let’s talk about the book itself, for it’s truly a fine little piece of work which ought to stand on its own rather than as a survival story of the publishing-consolidation wars. To understand the premise, you have to start with the back cover text, which defines a “bestiary” as a “medieval book combining descriptions of real or mythical animals with fables designed to teach a lesson.” The lesson taught in this tale isn’t as clear as something the Brothers Grimm or Aesop might have told (especially in the original, violent versions), but it still haunts.
Our nameless heroine/narrator, an introverted young adult living on Seattle’s Capitol Hill with little need or desire for companionship, meets, or runs into, or is run into by, a doberman pinscher. The narrator takes the dog into her tiny studio apartment, names her Miss Dog, and establishes an emotional bond with the creature beyond any she’d known with her fellow humans.
Then, somewhere around page 32, things get spooky. Miss Dog has a litter of puppies. Then the narrator also gives birth to a litter of puppies. Then more dogs of various ages and demeanors start appearing, as if from nowhere, in the apartment. They follow the narrator wherever she goes, seen by nobody else yet all too physically real to her. Then Miss Dog surgically removes the narrator’s heart, then feeds it back to her chopped up into hors d’ouvres. Then she’s ritually deflated, as a balloon, so there’s more room in the apartment for the ever-increasing numbers of dogs.
As strange as this reads in this summary form, it all makes perfect dream-logic as Brown tells it. She gradually increases the surrealism quotient, patiently (well, as patiently as can be done in a 166-page tale) luring her readers into the heroine’s otherworldly plight.
Brown also never gives an “it was just a dream” cop out. Instead, she ends the heroine’s tale of woe and harrassment on a thickly-disguised therapeutic note, as the heroine finally learns what the dogs had come to her for, to show her what had been missing from her own soul (or something like that). I also cannot do justice here to Brown’s elegant, exquisite prose. Mere excerpts wouldn’t show you the tone, the delicate pacing, of her work. You’ve really got to pick this up for yourself.
