Dog Days
Pam Houston likes long sentences, ones so protracted that they take up entire paragraphs, twisting and turning unexpectedly. It's easy to lose track of what she's saying, though she writes fluidly enough that she can be enjoyable to read.
She also likes to write from the perspective of a dog. Both devices make her eagerly awaited first novel, Sight Hound (Norton, $23.95), unique but ultimately confounding. The story's central inspiration is Dante, a cancer-stricken Irish wolfhound. Dante has a lot to teach his human, Rae, an iconoclastic playwright who lives with various boyfriends, friends and pets on a ranch in rural Colorado. Chapters are narrated, variously, by Dante, another dog named Rose, Stanley the cat and an assortment of humans.
There's not much of a plot, aside from Rae's breakups with several suitors and eventual marriage to Howard, a cross-dressing actor; Dante's visits to his two committed veterinarians; and the wolfhound's final battle with cancer, during which Houston spews forth an entire chapter of self-help blather, supposedly in Dante's voice: "After all, aren't we all just trying to learn the same things here, about sharing the food bowl with our sisters and brothers, trying to keep crumbs out of the dog bed, remembering to bring the squeaky toys inside in case of rain?" Though this section is light-hearted, Houston intends for us to take the message seriously -- that people can learn from animals' superior emotional intelligence.
Do any of the characters challenge the wisdom of expending thousands of dollars and multiple surgeries to prolong the life of an ailing pet? Perish the thought!
Given that Houston's 1993 short story collection Cowboys Are My Weakness was a bestseller and that America has a ready audience of dog-loving readers eager for the latest book full of treacly anthropomorphization, Sight Hound will likely sell well. That's a depressing thought.
Girl Power
Citizen Girl (Atria, $24.95), the sophomore effort by bestselling Nanny Diaries authors Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus, has already been roundly trashed by many critics. But although the book has issues, it's not such a bad read, as twentysomething chick lit goes. Au courant scene-setting, frequent dollops of sex and nudity and a sympathetic protagonist keep the straightforward plot ticking along.
The story: Idealistic Wesleyan women's-studies grad seeks meaningful work in Internet-busted Manhattan. Kraus and McLaughlin's early '00s Big Apple is vividly drawn, especially the art-gallery-infested far west Chelsea neighborhood, where our heroine finally lands a job at a woman-oriented Web portal: "At MC, Inc., desks are feng-shuied with whimsical eighties action figures, the requisite Simpsons paraphernalia, and eco-challenge vacation snapshots."
There are some jarring notes in this otherwise fluid story. The main character is named Girl -- an attempt at irony that falls flat. Continuing this silly theme, Girl's hedonistic, non-communicative boss is called Guy and her plucky romantic flame is Buster. Girl works at My Company, and, late in the book, a stern female character named Manley swoops in to try to rescue the enterprise from bankruptcy. Enough already.
Still, young professional readers will relate to the degrading challenge of scraping for entry-level work in a lousy economy and the tyranny of clueless, selfish bosses. And McLaughlin and Kraus should be lauded for creating an old-school feminist heroine who knows where to draw the line. (She refuses to don the bikini her bosses push on her at the company pool party, and she calls it quits when the portal converts to a porno site.) But they shouldn't have called her Girl.
Diagrams of Unhappiness
British journalist Carole Cadwalladr brings a unique twist to the family novel in her first book, The Family Tree (Dutton, $23.95). While growing up during the 1970s, narrator Rebecca Monroe perused the dictionary with her cousin Lucy, mostly in a quest to cross-reference sexual nomenclature ("Croupade: Any position in which he takes her squarely from behind"). The dictionary inspires the headings Cadwalladr gives her subchapters, such as "fate n 1 : power predetermining events unalterably from eternity." She also sprinkles the text with diagrams and graphs -- of Rebecca's family tree, of the DNA double helix -- and with footnote descriptions of '70s television shows and movies. " 'Charlie's Angels,' " she writes, "was structured around not female liberation, but the male gaze."
Rebecca is a vaguely unhappy cultural studies graduate student married to a cold-hearted behavioral geneticist who doesn't want children. As she grapples with her failing marriage, she flashes seamlessly back to family stories, including her grandmother Alicia's doomed romance with a kind Jamaican immigrant and her own childhood as the daughter of the manic-depressive, heavily hair-sprayed Doreen.
Full of wry observations about pop culture and British life and class, many passages seem designed to elicit belly laughs from British readers, while Americans less informed about life in the United Kingdom will manage only a titter. Still, Cadwalladr has written an inventive, touching book that offers a new take on the debate between nature and nurture. While she foreshadows Doreen's death early on, the climactic scene, during an elaborate TV party in honor of the royal wedding, is emotionally devastating. The story carries on from there with a degree of suspense. Is Rebecca fated to repeat her family's history? Cadwalladr leaves readers hoping she writes a sequel.
The War at Home
The brain-damaged narrator of Sandra Kring's touching World War II novel, Carry Me Home (Delta; paperback, $13), is 16-year-old Earl "Earwig" Gunderman, nicknamed by older brother Jimmy who, in Earwig's words, "says it's 'cause I'm like one of those bugs that crawls in a guy's ear and goes right to his brain, making him go crazy."
At first, Earwig's juvenile patter is almost as grating as one of those bugs. He curses crudely and incessantly -- "All the way to the millpond, them guys talk about titties, beers, and whose asses they're gonna kick." But as the story picks up momentum and brother Jimmy ships out to fight in the Pacific, Earwig's voice starts to ring true. As with young children who sometimes cut to the heart of the matter, Earwig's narration of his family's efforts to cope with the ravages of a faraway war becomes surprisingly poignant.
Kring, who wrote this first novel at age 50, also sheds light on a notorious aspect of World War II -- the defeat and brutal, years-long imprisonment of thousands of U.S. soldiers in Bataan. At one point, the Gunderman family receives a letter from the government telling of their son's capture, with the horrible news that no information is available on whether Jimmy is alive or dead.
Earwig's tale builds to an emotional crescendo when Jimmy finally returns home and must face both his own ravaged psyche and the ruined relationships the war has wrought on the Gundermans' small Wisconsin town. As Jimmy and two close soldier friends patch their lives back together with the help of deeply caring family and friends, the book becomes so engrossing that it's tough to see it end. At a time when American families of service men and women are struggling to fathom their loved ones' harrowing tours in Iraq, this novel is especially apt.
A Widow for One Year
In Home Away From Home (St. Martin's, $22.95), Lorna J. Cook tells the tale of Anna Rainey's annus horribilis. The story starts out dramatically as Dill, Anna's adored husband of six years, succumbs to a brain aneurysm. In the early pages of this quiet novel, Cook writes plainly but exquisitely about raw grief's blinding pain. "I couldn't form any words yet; they were frozen inside me under layers and layers of snow," realizes Anna. "Every morning, I'd shovel a path to get through the day, but by evening, it would be covered over again."
Unable to face the home she shared with her beloved husband, Anna moves from place to place, all the while reminiscing about her past and groping her way toward the future. She starts out staying with her mother, who is still wrestling with the long-ago loss of Anna's father. Next Anna moves on to a series of sympathetic friends, before migrating to a student dormitory and then a spartan rental apartment.
Eventually she returns to work, as an academic counselor to troubled students from tough backgrounds. There are a few plot twists involving a student whose little brother gets into an awful car accident, and Anna's desperate sexual fling with the 21-year-old who was driving the car (Anna is 34). She also bonds with a grieving 10-year-old whose widowed dad Anna meets in a support group.
In the end, a year has passed and, none too surprisingly, Anna finally finds her way back to the home she didn't think she could face. Cook has written a small, very personal story that comes close to being trite. But the book's early sections are vivid enough to carry Anna's struggle through to a meaningful conclusion. •
Susan Adams is an editor at Forbes magazine.
