This new novel, though only published this week, has already received a number of reviews. Virtually all agree that it’s a disappointment after the author’s triumphant debut Netherland [reviewed in Taipei Times Oct. 25, 2009]. I agree, but rather than laboring the point I’ll first explain what sort of reading experience it is, and then try to answer the question of why Joseph O’Neill made this seemingly bizarre career move.
The Dog largely takes place in Dubai. It’s a rambling first-person narrative by a US lawyer sent there to oversee the vast family fortune of a former student friend. It’s characterized by spun-out sentences, long digressions, and protracted sections, some even with numbered points and additionally numbered sub-points. Some parts may be satires on various forms of legalese involving deliberately verbose and dreary passages, but nevertheless the impression can’t be avoided of a clever writer letting his hyperactive brain spew out paragraph after paragraph, and never deleting anything.
One feature may be self-parodying, but it’s infuriating nonetheless. This is O’Neill’s habit of opening a series of brackets, but not closing them, until finally he closes them all at the same time, like this: Six is his maximum, but he reaches that total at least four times.
So maybe the dog of the title refers to the narrator (though this is never made explicit), a poor tool of the rich caught up in endless office trivia and unable to extricate himself. At the start of the book he takes up diving, but even this possible escape-route is soon abandoned.
So what we have is a text replete with references to LinkedIn, Facebook, FedEx, The Free Dictionary, the Online Etymological Dictionary and Autocomplete functions, and a whole range of friending requests. This poor office functionary — who at one point describes himself as a “mega-fool” — visits prostitutes, masturbates and tries to get out of a clearly failed nine-year relationship. He watches the tower blocks rise around him, tries ineffectually to trace a missing diving acquaintance, whose wife has arrived from Chicago looking for him, attempts to be kind to a good-natured assistant called Ali, and endeavors not to lose his temper with an infuriating scion of the rich family who he’s trying to educate but who persists in thinking “present tense” means something like “feeling worried.”
Despite all this, O’Neill can’t help dropping in some half-concealed literary references, to Philip Larkin, John Keats and others. There are also a few good jokes, as when a room, with its tattered sex magazines and on-screen pornography, in which the narrator tries to produce a sperm sample to give his one-time girlfriend the child she’s long wanted, is treated to the rich line “Onan himself would have found the set-up a challenge.”
But such moments are rare oases, and for page after page the undifferentiated desert of what you feel is deliberately dull prose stretches as far as the eye can see. Why is this? What does the formerly acclaimed Joseph O’Neill think he’s up to?
It seems to me that he’s trying to create some sort of modernist, or post-modernist, masterpiece, and those of us who can’t quite see the point of it are like the uncomprehending public who gave the early Picasso or Schoenberg such a hard time. Clearly someone as gifted as O’Neill doesn’t want to spin out enjoyably naturalistic novels until the crack of doom. And what subject could be more appropriate for the consideration of the conditions of modern life than the futuristic city of Dubai and the compulsive trivia of social networking?
Nevertheless, such a scenario comes with problems. If you want to depict mindlessness you run the risk of your resulting text being, if not exactly mindless, then monotonous at best. A book about boredom almost inevitably ends up being boring. Or, to take an 18th century parallel, O’Neill can be seen as a writer who, having written his Tom Jones, now wants to try his hand at Tristram Shandy. In the modern world he’s having a go at something akin to the creations of Nicholson Baker, where the wave of the hand of a man who’s holding a cloth against a rubber escalator handrail to clean it forms the narrative high-point of his 1988 novel The Mezzanine.
Does The Dog have anything else to offer? Yes, quite a bit. Dubai is vividly, if scarcely lovingly, evoked, with its prohibition on dogs in parks and on beaches, the world’s longest driverless metro, tallest hotel and most nationalities washing their hands at any one time. The social standing of the various up-market apartment blocks is alluded to, and the whole place is described as somewhere that’s trying to become like its own airport.
This, in other words, is a brave attempt by the author not to rest on his laurels but to produce something new and different. You sense, though, that the publishers had their reservations when you see that on the back cover they call the book’s protagonist “strange.” Is this a case of the unreliable narrator? In one sense yes, though he’s also all too aware of the situation he’s in, and is generally reliable, at least on his own terms.
But the novel’s a capacious form — I should know: I’m struggling to write one. If you think of something you find memorable the temptation is to put it in somewhere. I once thought, re hotels, “The more you pay, the more they add.” So I gave it to a character, though subsequently deleting it. The Dog ends with the otherwise inexplicable appearance of the former UK press baron Conrad Black, with the narrator’s girlfriend commenting “The richer you are, the worse you dance.” I recognize the ruse.
I’ll continue to be interested in anything Joseph O’Neill publishes. I didn’t want Netherland to end, but I nevertheless have to admit that The Dog is the only book I’ve ever read where I’ve written in (on page 119) the overjoyed exclamation HALF WAY!!!
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