The Last Days Of The Dog-Men. - Review - book review

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1998 by Irving Malin

THE LAST DAYS OF THE DOG-MEN by Brad Watson. New York: Norton, 1996. 146 pages. $19.

The title of this brilliant collection startles one. It suggests the unlikely union of animal and human natures, but it also points to the loss of this union. The epigraph emphasizes philosophical questions raised by the title. Taken from a book entitled Myths of the Dog-Men--is there really such a book?--the epigraph stresses potential meanings: "Ultimately, the dog ..., its constant presence in human experience coupled with its nearness to the feral world, is the alter ego of man himself." I expected the stories to be exotic and fabulous. Watson killed my expectations: he writes down-to-earth stories, not abstract meditations. He roots his epistemological concerns in the soil of daily life.

The title story offers details of ordinary experience. The narrator informs us in his plain, almost folksy manner that as a boy he always had hunting dogs. He accepted their "noises like someone was cutting their tails off." His style almost deceives one into thinking that he is an honest man, attuned to "raucous days." But as he moves in a rambling manner from realistic description to philosophical speculation, he troubles the reader. He is a man who lives among dogs, later marries Lois, and moves to suburbia. He lives in an "unanchored" world, unsure about his relation to women, to dogs, to all the "bloody secrets" of the heart. (Isn't "bloody" a wonderfully chosen adjective?) Now he is aware that all men seek meaning. Dogs, on the contrary, apparently "know" that they don't have to find relations; they think--if this is the right word--instinctively: a "dog is who he is and his only task is to assert this" (italics added). The word "assert," like "bloody," is somewhat strange. In fact, the strangeness of the story depends on the ambiguities of the narrator's conjunctions.

The story seems to wander; it is duplicitous. Every detail is meaningful. The narrator is displaced, separated from Lois; the other men who live in the same house are "unbalanced," "off-center." They are a "little tilted"--unlike the dogs who don't have to worry about the significance of things. And this slanted story resembles the troubled lives of all men and women, their shifting perceptions of love, anger, cruelty. Is it not natural that the narrator and his neighbors in the "falling-down" house long to become simple creatures?

Although I have lingered on the title story, I'm also particularly fond of the eccentric, slightly mad unions (and divorces) in the other stories. "The Wake" concerns a woman delivered to her former husband in a box. The two seem to take this UPS delivery as only slightly crazy. Marcia (from the box) says to Sam: "slightly weird." She has used a "creative punch" to return to Sam. "Kindred Spirits" becomes a ritualistic, mythological feast in which the humans eat "soul food"--or should I say human meat? One character says: "So you saying this might be hog, might be dog?" Or it may be a "woman barbecue."

This remarkable collection is Watson's first book. It captures the "shuffling sounds of the living"; the "violations" of "perfect order"; the "wandering attention" we give to potential obstructions in our identities. The collection heralds a brilliant career.

IRVING MALIN City College of New York