Joseph O’Neill won
the PEN/Faulkner fiction award for the novel Netherland in 2009. The
novel describes the life, in New York, of a man from The Netherlands. In an attempt to acclimate himself to his new
land, he joins a cricket club and begins playing with the team. The novel is about finding one’s way and
place in a foreign land. He continues
this theme in his latest novel, The Dog.
O’Neill was born in
Cork County, Ireland of an Irish father and a Syrian Catholic mother. His family traveled a lot, but they settled
in England, where O’Neill became a barrister with chambers in the Temple. He handled business law cases. Since 1998 he has lived in New York City
where he teaches at Bard College.
The Dog is a peculiar, yet engaging story of a man distraught over a break-up
with Jenn, his partner. He runs into a
college friend, Eddie Batros, the youngest son of a wealthy resident of
Dubai. He offers the narrator a job as
“Family Officer,” which has a vague, but eclectic, list of duties. These duties include anything from
babysitting a 14-year-old, Alain, who is struggling in school to approving
checks for the family foundation. The
name of this narrator is never specifically mentioned, but he refers to himself
as “I/Godfrey Pardew.” The story also
includes a number of unusual characters, who make his attempt to assimilate
into the Dubai culture all the more difficult.
O’Neill uses long,
long sentences with numerous parentheticals.
He sometimes closes sentences with as many as 3, 4, 5, or even 6. He writes in one instance, “(In my book, the
win-win-win ideal, valuable advance though it is on the mere win-win, does not
go far enough. It seems unsatisfactory
to restrict the stakeholders in a given transaction to the two transactors plus
the inescapable third party, to wit, the planetary/global lot. There is a
fourth admittedly subjective and conceptually vague interest at stake, namely
the effect of the transaction in terms of the human race’s susceptibility to
downfall or glory. And I suspect,
uselessly and a little awfully, that the definition there must be a further,
fifth plane of moral reality, beyond our animal comprehension, involving
interest that transcend even the destinies of our planet and of the human
soul. I do not mean the divine or the
universal as such. Nor am I mystically
hinting at some cosmic good news. If
only I were!)” (86).
An old say goes,
“Once a lawyer, always a lawyer.”
O’Neill is a lawyer; I/Godfrey Pardew is a lawyer, so inevitability the
bony hand of the law guides some of the prose.
Pardew also has a fondness for writing email which are requests for
clarifications, complaints, and candid opinions. However, he never sends any of these letters. He fails to completely understand the culture
of Dubai, and it costs him in the end.
Pardew’s days
consist of shuffling paper, signing a few documents, talking to Alain and his
assistant Ali, drinking, scuba diving, and relaxing in his massage chair. While the story in The Dog by Joseph O’Neill does hold the reader’s interest, the
meanderings of his mind and sentences, at whose length the mind boggles, did
become a tad annoying. Only my wondering
at what might happen to him tenuously held me from invoking the Rule of
50. 4 stars.
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