Writers connect to dogs’ eccentricities and insights

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BY NINA MURRAY / For the Lincoln Journal Star

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(“Dogs We Love: With Jane Smiley, Armistead Maupin, Ann Beattie, Edward Albee, and 14 Other Dog People,” edited by Michael J. Rosen, Artisan, $15.95).

The Scoop: A collection of essays by writers such as Lee K. Abbot, Jane Smiley, Ron Carlson, Ann Beattie and others, this handsome volume is a great gift for anyone who loves dogs or books.

Profits from this book, the eighth collection of donated writing about dogs, benefit The Company of Animals Fund, which makes grants to rescue, spay/neuter and otherwise care for pets in distress. To describe this collection as having a theme is to discover an answer that has much more to do with writers and writing than it does with dogs; rather than stories about dogs, the book offers stories about people describing their dogs and imagining their dogs’ inner lives.

What will keep you reading: The seemingly inexhaustible variety of eccentricities, grudges, complexes and insights that the writers manage to connect to dogs. In his witty and sharply observed introduction, Michael Rosen concludes that “animals are the stars under which we are born, the stars that shape and sway our lives.” In this view, dogs become our guiding beacons, symbols of something greater, purveyors of wisdom and teachers of life lessons. The retriever in Jane Smiley’s story is not just a dog bred to bring back whatever has fallen asunder, but a genius at work, to be admired and imitated. Even more explicitly, Ann Beattie amends her list of neurotic behaviors with notes on “how situation would be improved by the presence of a dog” — invariably, a dog would make all foibles meaningful and practical.

Where it stumbles: Where the writers reach a level of self-obsession that does not leave any room for the dogs of the book’s title. It takes Enid Shomer quite a balancing act to pull off a short piece about her grandparents’ pair of Chow-Chows, who were his “first encounter with the beautiful uselessness that feeds the soul, the nonstop obstinacies that lie at the heart of love and of art.” The dogs in question are reduced to mere objects to be gazed at, but they are being gazed at by a marvelling child, and this dreamlike perspective excuses Shomer from any real obligations of human-dog relationship. A few other writers in the collection are not quite so nimble.

When to pick it up: When looking for a gift for the literary-minded or longtime dog owner; also in the sad time of mourning a departed canine companion —the book’s sophisticated sentimentality will provide comfort and inspiration.

Nina Murray is a writer and translator in Lincoln.