Michiko Kakutani in this morning's Times reviewed a new novel titled The
Dog by Joseph O’Neill, poor fellow. She found nothing in it to like,
nothing at all. The story she found static and shallow, unconcerned with large
issues, and without emotional power. The narration was suffocating and the main
character generic. “None of this,” she wrote, “is remotely interesting to the
reader.”
Why then did she write the review? And
why did the Times put it on the front of The Arts section—or indeed anywhere in
the paper? Why did they think readers would be interested in a book she found
so totally boring? Aren’t most boring books ignored and left to die of neglect?
If the Times reviewed it because
O’Neill’s previous book Netherland
had been warmly received in 2008, was it necessary to torpedo his new one so
thoroughly and leave the landscape littered with its wreckage? It makes one
wonder about motives. At least, that might explain why some authors do not read
reviews.
Now comes the Sunday Book Review section
on August 7 with its front page devoted to a review of the same book, The Dog, but written by novelist
Lawrence Osborne who quite liked it.
He found the narrator “wrapped up in an
erudite and deliciously comic game of cat and mouse with a world that will
never reward him or even treat him fairly.” He found the “mad lingo...exquisite
and wonderfully overcooked....Perhaps,” he added, “it’s well beyond the ken of
your average New York lawyer.” (Or
book critic?)
“With a consummate elegance,” Osborne
concluded, “The Dog turns in on itself
in imitation of the dreadful circling and futility of consciousness itself. Its
subplots go nowhere, as in life. But, unlike life, its wit and brio keep us
temporarily more alive than we usually allow ourselves to be.”
Contrast that concluding sentence of
Osborne’s with Kakutani’s last sentence:
“Alas, in The Dog, the narrator barely budges from his unhappy little cocoon,
and there are no captivating characters...to alleviate his spiral of
self-pity—or the reader’s boredom.”
So, there you have it: The Dog is either elegant and witty or
unbearably awful.
