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book review

‘The Dog’ by Joseph O’Neill

With the rare exception of Marilynne Robinson and the late John Updike, contemporary literary fiction is secular. There is no God, but the god of narration. This tendency — however problematic, if one is a believer — has only enriched the Anglophone novel as an art form. As James Wood has argued, God’s departure puts the novel under greater pressure: A reader who does not simply believe must be compelled.

How few novelists have evolved with this freedom and created a morally rigorous environment, one embracing the questions God provokes. What is right or wrong? Will there be an accounting, in the end? It’s why we read so much crime fiction. Can there be virtue without punishment?

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It’s a question that lays at the heart of Joseph O’Neill’s amusing and thoughtful new novel, “The Dog,” which conjures a middle-aged lawyer, referred to only as X, cast out of a relationship and the United States, regrouping in the 21st century’s latest “abracadabropolis” of self-invention: Dubai.

In many ways, “The Dog” is a sister book to “Netherland,” O’Neill’s 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award winning novel about post-9/11 New York. “Life itself had become disembodied,” says Hans, that book’s hero, early in his telling, as he enters a domestic separation. “My family, the spine of my days, had crumbled. I was lost in invertebrate time.”

Both heroes reassemble their lives through a series of improbable relationships. Hans is taken in by a man determined to build a cricket pitch in Queens; in “The Dog,” X accepts a job working for a shadowy family of Lebanese merchants, essentially to make sure no one is stealing from within.

The books’ discursive forms are intensely similar, too. X is slightly more garrulous than Hans, but he narrates for the same reason. He needs to make sense of his situation, and he meanders a bit in doing so. He muses on the curious underworld of the sea, the use (and abuse) of pornography, building architecture, airports, cars, eventually getting around to the unbuilding of his marriage.

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Here “The Dog” deviates from “Netherland.” New York City gave Hans hope that meaningful connection between two people is possible. Dubai, in X’s lyrical and often hilarious depiction, is the capital of an absurd transactional culture. Foreigners are allowed in to do work, in exchange for certain liberties.

This higher-level transaction seeps into every aspect of our hero’s life and quickly becomes problematic. His employers, brilliantly portrayed with all the zooming intimacies and erratic irrationalities of real life billionaires, give him their trust precisely so that he will not do what trusted consigliores are supposed to do: speak freely.

X tries to play along, but the terms of his transactions always prove more slippery than he anticipated. He hires prostitutes twice a month, thinking if they aren’t trafficked and he pays them well, the exchange leaves him morally in the clear. Instead, he discovers a further wrinkle in the small print.

“The Dog” is a brilliant satire. Our hero has been provided everything — tasteful outdoor parks, brand-new roads — and nothing. He knows when relaxing into his expensive home massage chair that he is getting Human Touch and not human touch.

Gradually, his thoughts about the impossibility of living this way collide with the reckoning he must do to make sense of his broken relationship. There was a transaction, he senses, at the heart of his domestic partnership, one that had not been communicated but which contained a fatal flaw.

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“The Dog” is notable for many reasons. O’Neill writes beautiful sentences and observes the way small gestures can say a lot about a culture. (All the way down to how men in Gulf State malls sit in cafes, as if something exciting is being put off for a conversation.) He has a fabulous ear for language, as good as nearly anyone in American literature.

“The Dog” is most memorable, however, for the portrait it paints of guilt and its transference. Here is a man put in the dog house, trying to outrace his sense of responsibility by moving to a culture where responsibility is always passed along through a series of 21st century transactions. In “The Dog,” X discovers that this might work for a state, but not for a man. In a world without God, that transaction can only happen within himself.


John Freeman is the editor of “Tales of Two Cities: The Best of Times and Worst of Times in Today’s New York,” forthcoming from OR Books.