The Dog Pdf Summary
The author of the best-selling and award-winning Netherland now gives us his eagerly awaited, stunningly different new novel: a tale of alienation and heartbreak in Dubai.
Distraught by a breakup with his long-term girlfriend, our unnamed hero leaves New York to take an unusual job in a strange desert metropolis. In Dubai at the height of its self-invention as a futuristic Shangri-la, he struggles with his new position as the “family officer” of the capricious and very rich Batros family. And he struggles, even more helplessly, with the “doghouse,” a seemingly inescapable condition of culpability in which he feels himself constantly trapped—even if he’s just going to the bathroom, or reading e-mail, or scuba diving. A comic and philosophically profound exploration of what has become of humankind’s moral progress, The Dog is told with Joseph O’Neill’s hallmark eloquence, empathy, and storytelling mastery. It is a brilliantly original, achingly funny fable for our globalized times.
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The Dog Review
5.0 out of 5 stars A dark warning in a well executed, satisfying novel. .
Reviewed in the United States on August 31, 2017
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O’Neill presents a light satire of the contemporary social scene brilliantly, but the fun covers layers of more serious subtext. If the reader is not tuned in to the underlying social criticism, the ending comes as a shock. It is an uncomfortable ending as it is clearly intended to be. We get to kind of like this narrator. His explanations for what he does seem to make sense. His excuses for inaction are plausible. He seems like everyman just trying to get along in the world. But there is no system of values beyond his immediate comfort. O’Neill underscores this void just before the conclusion by having the narrator recall little quotations from John Kennedy and George Washington and Anna Julia Cooper from his mother’s kitchen, which he denigrates as sixth grade wisdom. X is too cynical to take comfort or meaning from this past. The blank, white wall he ends up facing is like a dissolution of his personhood, a horrific image.
In the beginning, however, we seem to be embarking on a fun sendup of silly expats in Dubai. Before he gets to Dubai, there is a great parody of the online community analyzing and eventually belittling an act of spontaneous bravery by a citizen. We can all experience the shock of recognition in that presentation. This is what the public discourse has become. You do start to pick up on X’s unusual lack of real human relationships though. His sexual relations go a fraudulent pretense of intimacy, to soft porn, to hard porn, to a massage chair. In the end his lover is a massage chair. The chair, Pasha, becomes a chilling metaphor for the complete depersonalization of relationships.
X’s sin is not corruption but complacency. His dishonesty consists in his failure to call out the cruelty that surrounds him. The deferral of all responsibility in the gibberish of user agreements seems so clever to X. But power relationships will always rule when the rule of law does not apply. The situation (also the name of his living quarters); the situation in Dubai is unacceptable. It violates in every respect the wise and honest standard humanity aspires to. The imagined emails that X does not send are exactly what he ought to have been sending if he were an honorable person. And, of course, at the heart of his inaction is Jenn, the woman whose future he stole because it was convenient. This novel has so many great sentences in it, but the one about Jenn is so right:
“There was always a chance she’d change her mind, and there was nothing to stop me from telling her that come what may I would not have a child with her because our quasi-marriage was a living death for me—surely a pretty significant piece of information that is absolutely one’s obligation to communicate to one’s partner in a timely fashion. Jenn, I’m so sorry.))”
We don’t really understand this about X until well into the novel. It comes as something of a shock. And then the rest of it starts to fit the pattern. Jenn’s retribution speaks of her loss. Her continuing, energy eating, enmity. She did not move on. The novel is ultimately an apt portrayal of the thing we have most to fear. If we don’t insist on those sixth-grade values, and fight to the death to defend them, Dubai is the future.
3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting enough
Reviewed in the United States on January 21, 2015
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It’s very hard to like the main character in this novel. If I were a psychiatrist maybe I could diagnose his mental state. As it is, he’s very self involved, doesn’t understand the effect he has on others. I think his situation in regard to others is even worse than he thinks.
He is a lawyer, and at times he thinks in lawyerese, the wherefores and whereins of every little tangential detail of a situation, following each thread to its final inconclusion. I have to admit I skipped through some of that as it went on for pages without a paragraph break. At other times, he simply over-thinks every situation.
The novel has a similar problem to “The Curious Case of the Dog at Night,” which is a story told from the point of view of an autistic boy and is thus written in flat uninteresting prose that reflects the way an autistic person might think. In “The Dog” we can see the narrator’s mind spinning circles as he traces every action to an effect and to another effect and etc.
Overall, I did find the book interesting enough to finish. I only wish we didn’t have to worry about “spoilers” so I could see what other reviewers thought about the ending.
About Joseph O’Neill Author Of The Dog pdf Book
Joseph O’Neill Author Of The Dog pdf Book was born in Cork, Ireland, in 1964 and grew up in Mozambique, South Africa, Iran, Turkey, and Holland. His previous works include the novels This is the Life and The Breezes, and the non-fiction book Blood-Dark Track, a family history centered on the mysterious imprisonment of both his grandfathers during World War II, which was an NYT Notable Book. He writes regularly for The Atlantic. He lives with his family in New York City.”
The Dog pdf, Paperback, Hardcover Book Information
- Publisher : Pantheon; First Printing edition (September 9, 2014)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 256 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0307378233
- ISBN-13 : 978-0307378231
- Item Weight : 1.05 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 1.09 x 9.27 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,449,297 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #10,433 in Psychological Fiction (Books)
- #14,375 in Humorous Fiction
- #62,979 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews: 3.3 out of 5 stars 179 ratings
Get A Copy Of The Dog pdf Or Paperback By Joseph O’Neill
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