The Dog
A Novel
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2.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
***A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK***
***LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014***
***PWs Best of the Year 2014***
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As he did brilliantly in Netherland, O'Neill, in his latest, creates a character who is alienated from his home and social class, and who feels dangerously vulnerable in a country in which he lives a luxurious but precarious existence. The unnamed narrator (we do learn that his given name begins with X) fled from his position in a Manhattan law firm after a bad breakup with a colleague. Feeling lucky at first to get a job in Dubai as "family officer" of the wealthy Batros family, the narrator discovers that he must ignore his ethical principles in order to do the blatantly illegal work required of him. Everyone encountered by the narrator is corrupt, except for his assistant, Ali, who is a bidoon a stateless person lacking basic human rights. O'Neill's Dubai is "a vast booby trap of medieval judicial perils," and the narrator gets caught in "one fucking glitch after another." Gradually, the sordidness of his situation wears down the his psychological defenses. His agitated thoughts, which the author conveys in pitch-perfect prose, become more and more muddled; his asides within asides (indicated by multiple parentheses) veer into philosophical ramblings and recurrent mea culpas, as he accuses himself of "chronic self-misrepresentation and inner absenteeism." The narrator develops an obsession with the disappearance of another American man, even while his own life cascades toward a dead end. Clever, witty, and profoundly insightful, this is a beautifully crafted narrative about a man undone by a soulless society.
