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The Dog
LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014 The new novel from Joseph O'Neill, his first since the Man Booker longlisted and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction-winning 'Netherland'.
241 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2014
129 people are currently reading
3,550 people want to read
About the author
Joseph O'Neill
29 books223 followersJoseph^O'Neill
There is more than one author with this name on Goodreads.
Joseph O'Neill 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."
There is more than one author with this name on Goodreads.
Joseph O'Neill 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."
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November 30, 2014
We never learn the real name of the narrator in Joseph O’Neill’s new novel, but we do learn that his professional name begins with the letter X. He won’t reveal his given name under pain of humiliation. X. thinks of himself, with a little help from his former lover, as “the dog,” as in “it appears I’m in the doghouse.” He thinks fairly rationally (probably due to his legal training) but with long trailing parenthetical asides, sometimes requiring up to five (or six!) parentheses together to finally close the ellipses of his ruminations and bring him back to the point.
And the point is…our man, just an ordinary man by the sounds of him, has got himself out on a very thin limb and…he really has no friends. Or rather, he does have friends, but only the kind that helpfully change the subject when it looks as though someone might actually say something revealing or personal. You know—the kind of friends that might offer you a job but might not be the kind you actually want to work for. Which he did. Take the job. In Dubai.
That is to say, he quit the job he had in the law firm he shared with his nine-year not-quite-wife, abandoned his rent-controlled one-bedroom in Gramercy Park, escaping initially to a luxury rental in New Jersey near the Lincoln Tunnel, and then he moved to Dubai. As X. himself writes,
There is something vaguely embarrassing yet deliciously sexy to witness this man’s emotional strip-tease. He is not a hard-edged corporate lawyer, the “I can handle anything” type of man, but one who is perplexed and bewildered to find himself living a life he doesn’t actually like nor want. He is clearly still a little in love with his longtime former lover, Jenn, and recognizes that he bears some blame for being emotionally blank and linguistically blocked when it came to expressing 1) his lack of interest in moving away from his rent-controlled one-bedroom to a larger apartment and 2) his lack of interest in starting a family at 36 years old.
Once X. begins to see that, in fact, he is not enjoying himself at all despite living in an expensive apartment in an expensive city and outwardly living the life of Riley and he lets down his normal reserve enough to start telling us about it…well…it is frankly hysterically funny. Because, yes, if one looks at it from a simply voyeuristic point of view, he simply has nothing at all despite the aforementioned apartment in the gleaming city by the sea…and the desert. (”It’s almost nauseating to see the sand wherever the efforts to cover it has not yet succeeded.”) When he begins to think aloud how liberating it is that he could actually hang himself at any time because he has no kids nor spouse to worry about in terms of timing, we can’t help but chuckle. Not a good reaction to have, but this guy is already eviscerated. We’d just witness the burial.
X.’s apartment in Dubai looks out on a city constantly under construction. The buildings are tall and spectacular, and one construction site catches X.’s imagination. He calls it Project X. After one day sending his “man”, Ali, out to find out what it will be, Ali comes back with the news that the building is a mock-up, a “scale representation” of another building. “Project X isn’t a project at all. It’s a dummy run…The action has moved somewhere else.” Sadly, our minds flit to X. himself, imagining his now-empty 36 years as a mock-up for a life of promise and fulfilment and honor. Later, when he faces legal action himself, his shocked outburst, “this is my good name we’re talking about!” prompts his employer to respond, “Your name? What name?”
If one ever wondered what, exactly, it would be like to live in Dubai, here you will have one answer. X. calmly and pointedly gives us Dubai’s “crimes of nature against man” and the “Dubaian counterattack on the natural,” as well as his increasingly distressed and alienated view of the expat scene. But when he returns to New York on a business trip and expresses horror at the lumpy streets and soot-blackened store fronts, with some regret we note his former home is home no more. Alas.
Modern man, as we wish we never saw him. O’Neill, our Scheherazade, unravelling his gossamer veils one by one. I wish it didn’t end.
The Random House Audio production is brilliantly, and dolefully, read by Erik Davies. I found myself wanting to quote large sections of this in my review...but there was too much. Gorgeous language.
And the point is…our man, just an ordinary man by the sounds of him, has got himself out on a very thin limb and…he really has no friends. Or rather, he does have friends, but only the kind that helpfully change the subject when it looks as though someone might actually say something revealing or personal. You know—the kind of friends that might offer you a job but might not be the kind you actually want to work for. Which he did. Take the job. In Dubai.
That is to say, he quit the job he had in the law firm he shared with his nine-year not-quite-wife, abandoned his rent-controlled one-bedroom in Gramercy Park, escaping initially to a luxury rental in New Jersey near the Lincoln Tunnel, and then he moved to Dubai. As X. himself writes,
“a person usually needs a special incentive to be here—or, perhaps more accurately, not to be elsewhere—and surely this is all the more true for the American who, rather than trying his luck in California or Texas or New York, chooses to come to this strange desert metropolis. Either way, fortune will play its expected role. I suppose I say all this from experience….One way to sum up the stupidity of this phase of my life, a phase I’m afraid is ongoing, would be to call it the phase of insights.”
There is something vaguely embarrassing yet deliciously sexy to witness this man’s emotional strip-tease. He is not a hard-edged corporate lawyer, the “I can handle anything” type of man, but one who is perplexed and bewildered to find himself living a life he doesn’t actually like nor want. He is clearly still a little in love with his longtime former lover, Jenn, and recognizes that he bears some blame for being emotionally blank and linguistically blocked when it came to expressing 1) his lack of interest in moving away from his rent-controlled one-bedroom to a larger apartment and 2) his lack of interest in starting a family at 36 years old.
Once X. begins to see that, in fact, he is not enjoying himself at all despite living in an expensive apartment in an expensive city and outwardly living the life of Riley and he lets down his normal reserve enough to start telling us about it…well…it is frankly hysterically funny. Because, yes, if one looks at it from a simply voyeuristic point of view, he simply has nothing at all despite the aforementioned apartment in the gleaming city by the sea…and the desert. (”It’s almost nauseating to see the sand wherever the efforts to cover it has not yet succeeded.”) When he begins to think aloud how liberating it is that he could actually hang himself at any time because he has no kids nor spouse to worry about in terms of timing, we can’t help but chuckle. Not a good reaction to have, but this guy is already eviscerated. We’d just witness the burial.
X.’s apartment in Dubai looks out on a city constantly under construction. The buildings are tall and spectacular, and one construction site catches X.’s imagination. He calls it Project X. After one day sending his “man”, Ali, out to find out what it will be, Ali comes back with the news that the building is a mock-up, a “scale representation” of another building. “Project X isn’t a project at all. It’s a dummy run…The action has moved somewhere else.” Sadly, our minds flit to X. himself, imagining his now-empty 36 years as a mock-up for a life of promise and fulfilment and honor. Later, when he faces legal action himself, his shocked outburst, “this is my good name we’re talking about!” prompts his employer to respond, “Your name? What name?”
If one ever wondered what, exactly, it would be like to live in Dubai, here you will have one answer. X. calmly and pointedly gives us Dubai’s “crimes of nature against man” and the “Dubaian counterattack on the natural,” as well as his increasingly distressed and alienated view of the expat scene. But when he returns to New York on a business trip and expresses horror at the lumpy streets and soot-blackened store fronts, with some regret we note his former home is home no more. Alas.
Modern man, as we wish we never saw him. O’Neill, our Scheherazade, unravelling his gossamer veils one by one. I wish it didn’t end.
The Random House Audio production is brilliantly, and dolefully, read by Erik Davies. I found myself wanting to quote large sections of this in my review...but there was too much. Gorgeous language.
July 4, 2014
First, I have to admire O'Neil for taking quite a risk after his successful and engaging novel, NETHERLAND, which not only put him on the map, but established him as a fine author in the theme of dislocation and alienation. Here, too, his themes are largely about the displacement of foreigners. In this case, the protagonist and unnamed narrator, a New York attorney, was born in Switzerland and raised in the US. (A bit of cheeky irony--we don't know his name, but we do know his alter ego or alias). He was hired by an obscenely wealthy Lebanese family to move to Dubai and act in the role of fiduciary and legal overseer--Family Officer--of their funds. They also ask him to keep a close eye on and mentor one of their 17 year-old family members, an indolent boy that lacks ambition.
O'Neil's urbane postmodern writing is both sardonic and sad, yet there was no escape from the increasingly foul funk of it. At its best, he echoes a combination of Kafka, Thomas Pynchon, and even George Orwell (in his auguring humor). His depiction of the class system and byzantine legalese of Dubai is nothing short of brilliant. "...for the non-national the emirate is a vast booby trap of medieval judicial perils, and Johnny Foreigner must especially take great care in interactions with local citizens...because de facto there is one law for Abdul Emerati and another for Johnny Foreigner..." However, his turgidity, combined with the relentless repugnance of the narrative, was wearying. he is a polished writer, but of tasteless content.
O'Neil uses shock value at the mid-point of the novel, perhaps to resuscitate it from flat-lining. The narrator enjoys his afternoon Internet porn following his noontime bathroom constitutional. However, the lurid vileness that he added to the porn disengaged me from the character. On the other hand, I have to hand it to O'Neil--he bravely pushes the envelope of human depravity. But...why? It's deeply superficial; he is teasing the reader to be hip enough to accept his brand of purposeless vulgarity.
The narrator's break-up with his girlfriend, a lawyer he met in the Manhattan law firm he worked out, is detailed in the problems that drove them apart. O'Neil did a stellar job of making the reader uncomfortable, observing very private things behind closed doors. He adds on a little mystery with the case of the missing scuba diver, Ted Wilson, and then (purposely) turns us off with the narrator's interactions with Wilson's wife. And then there is a place he refers to as Project X, a building project that he desires to know more about. As far as the attempted levity related to his periodic pedicures, it was thoroughly lost on me.
If you are looking for a plot, you won't find it here. It is largely a Kafkaesque study of the labyrinth legal and social system of the UAE, as well as a soul-stripping story of our hero's loneliness. Too, it illuminates the crushing of the human psyche and dignity. And, not least of all, the depths of debasement and pathetic vacuity.
O'Neil's urbane postmodern writing is both sardonic and sad, yet there was no escape from the increasingly foul funk of it. At its best, he echoes a combination of Kafka, Thomas Pynchon, and even George Orwell (in his auguring humor). His depiction of the class system and byzantine legalese of Dubai is nothing short of brilliant. "...for the non-national the emirate is a vast booby trap of medieval judicial perils, and Johnny Foreigner must especially take great care in interactions with local citizens...because de facto there is one law for Abdul Emerati and another for Johnny Foreigner..." However, his turgidity, combined with the relentless repugnance of the narrative, was wearying. he is a polished writer, but of tasteless content.
O'Neil uses shock value at the mid-point of the novel, perhaps to resuscitate it from flat-lining. The narrator enjoys his afternoon Internet porn following his noontime bathroom constitutional. However, the lurid vileness that he added to the porn disengaged me from the character. On the other hand, I have to hand it to O'Neil--he bravely pushes the envelope of human depravity. But...why? It's deeply superficial; he is teasing the reader to be hip enough to accept his brand of purposeless vulgarity.
The narrator's break-up with his girlfriend, a lawyer he met in the Manhattan law firm he worked out, is detailed in the problems that drove them apart. O'Neil did a stellar job of making the reader uncomfortable, observing very private things behind closed doors. He adds on a little mystery with the case of the missing scuba diver, Ted Wilson, and then (purposely) turns us off with the narrator's interactions with Wilson's wife. And then there is a place he refers to as Project X, a building project that he desires to know more about. As far as the attempted levity related to his periodic pedicures, it was thoroughly lost on me.
If you are looking for a plot, you won't find it here. It is largely a Kafkaesque study of the labyrinth legal and social system of the UAE, as well as a soul-stripping story of our hero's loneliness. Too, it illuminates the crushing of the human psyche and dignity. And, not least of all, the depths of debasement and pathetic vacuity.
September 18, 2014
Joseph O’Neill’s “The Dog” arrives trailing clouds of glory from his previous novel, “Netherland,” which was longlisted for the Booker Prize, won the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award and managed to make cricket cool in America. Set in the aftermath of Sept. 11, “Netherland” told the story of a depressed financial analyst estranged from his wife, but that plot was more garnish than meal. What the book really offered was O’Neill’s reflections on New York, relationships, ambition and especially cricket — all spun in sentences so clever that the destination hardly mattered.
Sachin Tendulkar, one of the greatest players ever, once said, “Life without cricket is unthinkable,” and now O’Neill seems determined to prove that fiction without cricket is unbearable. This time, we’re in Dubai with a depressed lawyer estranged from his longtime girlfriend, and once again, the storyline has been beaten to airy thinness. Even the narrator’s name has been radically attenuated, reduced to the single letter X, which, as a symbol of evaporated identity, is about as subtle as getting whacked in the face with a cricket bat.
We’re dealing with a man who introduces himself by claiming that “the accumulation of experience amounts, when all is said and pondered, simply to extra weight.” Given that disparaging opinion of what non-depressed people might call “plot,” it’s not surprising to find a novel that feels both weighty and inconsequential, an addition to that genre of stories about adrift, disaffected middle-aged men. X is a comically, absurdly and finally maddeningly digressive narrator, a human Internet of hyperlinks that lead everywhere but have no real purpose.
You don’t mind at first because nobody choreographs a pas de deux of wit and despair quite as elegantly as O’Neill. In the wake of a soul-crushing breakup with his girlfriend in New York, X accepts a job in Dubai from a longtime acquaintance who thinks, mistakenly, that X is a friend of Donald Trump. As the new trustee of the Batros Group, X is charged with supervising a $500 million fortune that supports a profligate Middle Eastern clan. The Batros Group is, obviously, a shell corporation composed of legal and illegal enterprises, and X’s job involves nothing more than sitting in an office for a few hours a day rubber-stamping documents he doesn’t understand.
Despite its exotic, gold-plated setting, “The Dog” belongs in that putty-colored file cabinet of office satires that stretch from “Bartleby, the Scrivener” to “Then We Came to the End.” O’Neill’s innovation is to assure us that meaningless work is just as mind-numbing at $500 an hour as it is at minimum wage. X spends much of his day composing “mental-mail,” fantastical e-mail messages that he’s too cowardly to send — or even write. He’s an ineffective, chronically ruminative man who thinks of himself as a “supererogatory weirdo.” “Mine is the inevitable fate of the overwhelmed fiduciary: inextinguishable boredom and fear of liability.”
The location of his new job only aggravates X’s deepening sense of disassociation. Awash in cash, Dubai is a “land of signs to nowhere,” a place divorced from the rules of ordinary life, even from the laws of physics. In that indefatigable voice that seems to keep speaking as a last-ditch act of survival, our narrator describes “an abracadabrapolis in which buildings flopped against each other and skyscrapers looked wobbly or were rumpled or might be twice as tall and slender as the Empire State Building, a city whose coastline featured bizarre man-made peninsulas as well as those already-famous artificial islets known as The World, so named because they were grouped to suggest, to a bird’s eye, a physical map of the world; a city where huge stilts rose out of the earth and disappeared like Jack’s beanstalk, three hundred meters up, into a synthetic cloud.”
For X, though, “this wonderland was the same as any other human place: it boiled down to a bunch of rooms.” He goes on to tell us, “I had a theory or two about rooms.” In fact, X has a theory or two or 200 about everything.
“One way to sum up the stupidity of this phase of my life,” he says, “would be to call it the phase of insights.” And insights are what we get — a breathless rush of insights about architecture, labor law, toenails, teenagers, gossip, pornography, immigrants and scuba diving. Insights, it seems, are all that are left of this bright but ruined man. While fantasizing about playing the hero in strangers’ lives, he takes great interest in a bigamist who abandoned his American wife in Dubai. He frets about the reputation of his apartment building vis-à-vis a neighboring apartment building. As a bulwark against suicidal depression, he gloms onto brand names and marketing lingo with religious fervency.
With this ever-mutating monologue, X is engaged in a futile act of talking himself into existence, proving his worth by his carefully documented sensitivity and accountability. The sentences — many stretching to hundreds of words — form a glittery parody of legal prose, crowded with exceptions and explanations and (parenthetical (asides (sometimes (nested (six (deep)))))). A pedicure inspires his disquisition on his clients’ responsibilities to freelance laborers. He donates large sums of money to charity. He hounds the maids to accept tips. He’s so self-conscious about behaving ethically that he assures us that the Internet porn he’s watching involves only respectful husband-and-wife actors.
There’s no denying that every page of “The Dog” is a little masterpiece of comedy, erudition and linguistic acrobatics. The question is: How much of this can you endure? How long does it take to feel the full import of X’s harrowing loneliness? Arthur Phillips made this work with his brilliant debut novel, “Prague.” But “Dog” is closer to the kill-me-now tedium of Jonathan Lethem’s “Chronic City.”
When I started reading a chapter of “The Dog” to my wife, she thought I was being far too critical, but as the pages wore on, she felt an urgent need to check on the laundry. I envied her.
This review appeared in The Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/enterta...
Sachin Tendulkar, one of the greatest players ever, once said, “Life without cricket is unthinkable,” and now O’Neill seems determined to prove that fiction without cricket is unbearable. This time, we’re in Dubai with a depressed lawyer estranged from his longtime girlfriend, and once again, the storyline has been beaten to airy thinness. Even the narrator’s name has been radically attenuated, reduced to the single letter X, which, as a symbol of evaporated identity, is about as subtle as getting whacked in the face with a cricket bat.
We’re dealing with a man who introduces himself by claiming that “the accumulation of experience amounts, when all is said and pondered, simply to extra weight.” Given that disparaging opinion of what non-depressed people might call “plot,” it’s not surprising to find a novel that feels both weighty and inconsequential, an addition to that genre of stories about adrift, disaffected middle-aged men. X is a comically, absurdly and finally maddeningly digressive narrator, a human Internet of hyperlinks that lead everywhere but have no real purpose.
You don’t mind at first because nobody choreographs a pas de deux of wit and despair quite as elegantly as O’Neill. In the wake of a soul-crushing breakup with his girlfriend in New York, X accepts a job in Dubai from a longtime acquaintance who thinks, mistakenly, that X is a friend of Donald Trump. As the new trustee of the Batros Group, X is charged with supervising a $500 million fortune that supports a profligate Middle Eastern clan. The Batros Group is, obviously, a shell corporation composed of legal and illegal enterprises, and X’s job involves nothing more than sitting in an office for a few hours a day rubber-stamping documents he doesn’t understand.
Despite its exotic, gold-plated setting, “The Dog” belongs in that putty-colored file cabinet of office satires that stretch from “Bartleby, the Scrivener” to “Then We Came to the End.” O’Neill’s innovation is to assure us that meaningless work is just as mind-numbing at $500 an hour as it is at minimum wage. X spends much of his day composing “mental-mail,” fantastical e-mail messages that he’s too cowardly to send — or even write. He’s an ineffective, chronically ruminative man who thinks of himself as a “supererogatory weirdo.” “Mine is the inevitable fate of the overwhelmed fiduciary: inextinguishable boredom and fear of liability.”
The location of his new job only aggravates X’s deepening sense of disassociation. Awash in cash, Dubai is a “land of signs to nowhere,” a place divorced from the rules of ordinary life, even from the laws of physics. In that indefatigable voice that seems to keep speaking as a last-ditch act of survival, our narrator describes “an abracadabrapolis in which buildings flopped against each other and skyscrapers looked wobbly or were rumpled or might be twice as tall and slender as the Empire State Building, a city whose coastline featured bizarre man-made peninsulas as well as those already-famous artificial islets known as The World, so named because they were grouped to suggest, to a bird’s eye, a physical map of the world; a city where huge stilts rose out of the earth and disappeared like Jack’s beanstalk, three hundred meters up, into a synthetic cloud.”
For X, though, “this wonderland was the same as any other human place: it boiled down to a bunch of rooms.” He goes on to tell us, “I had a theory or two about rooms.” In fact, X has a theory or two or 200 about everything.
“One way to sum up the stupidity of this phase of my life,” he says, “would be to call it the phase of insights.” And insights are what we get — a breathless rush of insights about architecture, labor law, toenails, teenagers, gossip, pornography, immigrants and scuba diving. Insights, it seems, are all that are left of this bright but ruined man. While fantasizing about playing the hero in strangers’ lives, he takes great interest in a bigamist who abandoned his American wife in Dubai. He frets about the reputation of his apartment building vis-à-vis a neighboring apartment building. As a bulwark against suicidal depression, he gloms onto brand names and marketing lingo with religious fervency.
With this ever-mutating monologue, X is engaged in a futile act of talking himself into existence, proving his worth by his carefully documented sensitivity and accountability. The sentences — many stretching to hundreds of words — form a glittery parody of legal prose, crowded with exceptions and explanations and (parenthetical (asides (sometimes (nested (six (deep)))))). A pedicure inspires his disquisition on his clients’ responsibilities to freelance laborers. He donates large sums of money to charity. He hounds the maids to accept tips. He’s so self-conscious about behaving ethically that he assures us that the Internet porn he’s watching involves only respectful husband-and-wife actors.
There’s no denying that every page of “The Dog” is a little masterpiece of comedy, erudition and linguistic acrobatics. The question is: How much of this can you endure? How long does it take to feel the full import of X’s harrowing loneliness? Arthur Phillips made this work with his brilliant debut novel, “Prague.” But “Dog” is closer to the kill-me-now tedium of Jonathan Lethem’s “Chronic City.”
When I started reading a chapter of “The Dog” to my wife, she thought I was being far too critical, but as the pages wore on, she felt an urgent need to check on the laundry. I envied her.
This review appeared in The Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/enterta...
December 29, 2014
[4.5] A very interesting book. And not at all what I expected from Joseph O'Neill, whom I'd taken for American fiction's Mr Boring - on the strength of Zadie Smith's famous essay Two Paths for the Novel, even if the piece's essential idea did seem over-simplified. Some paragraphs in The Dog must count as Lyrical Realism, but almost none of this book is 'blah litfic', the gut response via which I usually label Lyrical Realism.
O'Neill isn't quite what he seems either: says an article, the longlist contains so many white men, white people generally... He's actually half Turkish and if his name were too, he would probably be classified differently by commentators. Like the narrator if he removes his unused unusual first name, he is "completely camouflaged by [his] name's commonness". The Dog is full of a sense of not entirely belonging anywhere whilst on the surface all strives to be correct, sometimes trying to adhere to the values of opposing forces simultaneously. A more subtle and powerful evocation of the immigrant, or half-immigrant, condition than a lot of first-generation family sagas.
It's predominantly written in a style associated with office work, rather than any floweriness of literature; although it doesn't use actual legal jargon it's from a mind - narrator and author - for which legalistic writing is routine. It's a meticulous examination of internal thought processes, contemporary middle-class ethics, and the inevitability of compromise and falling short. An up-to-the-minute existentialism.
A critique of capitalism and the modern condition that, because it's more realistic and hardly ever violent, is way sharper than American Psycho. And a realistic updating of the disgruntled not-quite-middle-aged single male narrator for a point in time when men of my background and generation are less likely to say with marginal emarrassment that they sometimes identified with Portnoy, than to write about their project of reading more female writers (and honestly seem to mean it, although I still see a suppression of intrinsic human interest and enjoyment in favour of brow-beatenness, sheepish adherence to the viral internet and a state of being both more patronising towards and patronised by women than previously).
Reviews of O'Neill's Netherland point out the significant drawback for many readers of the main character being a highly-paid 1%-er. The narrator of The Dog isn't quite there, but he is working for them and would be a higher rate taxpayer in the UK. Following a horrendous breakup with a New York colleague, he takes a job in Dubai as a "family officer", a kind of financial manager, for a family of shady shipping multimillionaires, one of whom was once his university flatmate. He lives in a modern luxury complex which is a typical part of an entire city which has the temporary, air-cushioned vacuum feeling of chain hotels (only with an absurd level of amenities). The absurdly narcissistic ads for the building and others like it, followed by the hubris of the recession-frozen construction sites, and in the finished complexes more workaday residents than once envisaged - is the same trajectory as that of many recent warehouse and factory conversions in British cities.
His the kind of post and lifestyle which makes him easy to bracket with wanker-bankers - though his thoughts are more burdened with guilt and thoughts of ethics than most of his peers (a set of ethics which online is frequently termed 'social justice' by hundreds of thousands of people who've never been near volunteering in a soup kitchen or any other social justice work as the term used to mean before the internet mangled it into the war cry of Twitter mobs).
His guilt has only has a marginal effect on his actions at work. But whilst there is a difference of degrees in terms of the actual impact of a person's job, the same trains of thought, the same ethical cheese-paring and boundary-drawing, and having to follow policies you don't think are right, are universal. They also occur in charity and public sector jobs which sound like the most socially useful things you could earn money from. (Or not earn it - they apply in volunteering too.) You can never help everybody, and you can't even help that one person with everything. You always have to set the boundaries somewhere although to do so inevitably feels ruthless to both sides. (Some people try not to - a former colleague told me how when she was younger she'd got into debt because she was giving so much money to charity... and then ended paying more in interest than originally to the charities.) I sometimes wondered to what extent it was weak to want the day to day gratification of helping people directly and a job title that sounded nice, and if it might even be more useful, if only I'd been sufficiently healthy, to have a high-powered City job and donate most of one's salary, enough to fund several of my own charity post. I've been through variants of many of the thought-processes in The Dog, never seen them so closely rendered on paper, and I admire the way O'Neill has pinned these ideas so exactly (whilst making them sound 'real', with the occasional word-error and formidable bracket overuse). He applies similar precision to his description of how to do Sudoku, a procedure it was rather amazing to see verbalised.
The narrator is not a fan of the growing social media of 2007-11 (his years of employment) but he does spend a lot of time on the internet: forums, Google, Wikipedia, and porn (until he's so shocked by unexpectedly violent porn that he stops dead). Much of life is him on his own, or him and the computer. His social isolation in Dubai probably makes more pronounced his use of professional status and connection as a primary way of describing himself and others. It's quite a cold, cerebral narrative; whilst there's humour and methodical consideration of others' experiences, there isn't substantial fun or warmth here (which is why I've tentatively rounded my 4.5 down not up) - although I only tended to feel something missing when I surfaced from the book, because whilst reading I was buzzing with its resonance both personal and general.
'Dog' has multiple meanings: a dogsbody (he is one, and he in turn employs one of his own), wanting a dog for a pet but not being allowed, being dogged by guilt no matter where he goes, the state of guilt and shame "being in the doghouse" in his former relationship and generally - all subtly augmented by the unclean status of dogs in Arab culture. A sense that whatever you do, you can't help being to some extent bad. I felt the central question of the book to be: At what level does one stop trying and/or self-flagellating and become resigned to things?
(I became aware that I may be more forgiving to this narrator's professional situation than some readers would be because, being so tired, I empathise very readily with inertia and a sense of stuckness even when the subject might actually have the wherewithal to do something about it. But anyway, these days, at the other end of the economic scale from this chap, there are a lot of people doing jobs with a negative social impact, e.g. aggressive telesales, who really have no choice. So although his earnings are many times theirs, similar, yet really more urgent and difficult, dilemmas still occur.)
There is a huge amount to say about The Dog. I have a hunch that critics will be calling this an Important Book. Another thing I've not gone into yet is the religious theme which plays out in the denoument, more obvious when added to the narrator's probable Christian name. Although it's only 240 pages, this book has enough substance to launch a thousand essays. However I am not sure that average undergrads would get so much out of it: it speaks very much to and of the sense of loserishness that hits in the second half of one's thirties if adrift without an intact long-term partnership and / or offspring, or at the very least an actual divorce. And its intricate prison of work and consumerist dilemmas is most vivid with a good few years of different jobs and experiences under the belt, and having heard and thought these things over and over to the paradoxical point of boredom-yet-knowing-they-still-matter.
O'Neill isn't quite what he seems either: says an article, the longlist contains so many white men, white people generally... He's actually half Turkish and if his name were too, he would probably be classified differently by commentators. Like the narrator if he removes his unused unusual first name, he is "completely camouflaged by [his] name's commonness". The Dog is full of a sense of not entirely belonging anywhere whilst on the surface all strives to be correct, sometimes trying to adhere to the values of opposing forces simultaneously. A more subtle and powerful evocation of the immigrant, or half-immigrant, condition than a lot of first-generation family sagas.
It's predominantly written in a style associated with office work, rather than any floweriness of literature; although it doesn't use actual legal jargon it's from a mind - narrator and author - for which legalistic writing is routine. It's a meticulous examination of internal thought processes, contemporary middle-class ethics, and the inevitability of compromise and falling short. An up-to-the-minute existentialism.
A critique of capitalism and the modern condition that, because it's more realistic and hardly ever violent, is way sharper than American Psycho. And a realistic updating of the disgruntled not-quite-middle-aged single male narrator for a point in time when men of my background and generation are less likely to say with marginal emarrassment that they sometimes identified with Portnoy, than to write about their project of reading more female writers (and honestly seem to mean it, although I still see a suppression of intrinsic human interest and enjoyment in favour of brow-beatenness, sheepish adherence to the viral internet and a state of being both more patronising towards and patronised by women than previously).
Reviews of O'Neill's Netherland point out the significant drawback for many readers of the main character being a highly-paid 1%-er. The narrator of The Dog isn't quite there, but he is working for them and would be a higher rate taxpayer in the UK. Following a horrendous breakup with a New York colleague, he takes a job in Dubai as a "family officer", a kind of financial manager, for a family of shady shipping multimillionaires, one of whom was once his university flatmate. He lives in a modern luxury complex which is a typical part of an entire city which has the temporary, air-cushioned vacuum feeling of chain hotels (only with an absurd level of amenities). The absurdly narcissistic ads for the building and others like it, followed by the hubris of the recession-frozen construction sites, and in the finished complexes more workaday residents than once envisaged - is the same trajectory as that of many recent warehouse and factory conversions in British cities.
His the kind of post and lifestyle which makes him easy to bracket with wanker-bankers - though his thoughts are more burdened with guilt and thoughts of ethics than most of his peers (a set of ethics which online is frequently termed 'social justice' by hundreds of thousands of people who've never been near volunteering in a soup kitchen or any other social justice work as the term used to mean before the internet mangled it into the war cry of Twitter mobs).
His guilt has only has a marginal effect on his actions at work. But whilst there is a difference of degrees in terms of the actual impact of a person's job, the same trains of thought, the same ethical cheese-paring and boundary-drawing, and having to follow policies you don't think are right, are universal. They also occur in charity and public sector jobs which sound like the most socially useful things you could earn money from. (Or not earn it - they apply in volunteering too.) You can never help everybody, and you can't even help that one person with everything. You always have to set the boundaries somewhere although to do so inevitably feels ruthless to both sides. (Some people try not to - a former colleague told me how when she was younger she'd got into debt because she was giving so much money to charity... and then ended paying more in interest than originally to the charities.) I sometimes wondered to what extent it was weak to want the day to day gratification of helping people directly and a job title that sounded nice, and if it might even be more useful, if only I'd been sufficiently healthy, to have a high-powered City job and donate most of one's salary, enough to fund several of my own charity post. I've been through variants of many of the thought-processes in The Dog, never seen them so closely rendered on paper, and I admire the way O'Neill has pinned these ideas so exactly (whilst making them sound 'real', with the occasional word-error and formidable bracket overuse). He applies similar precision to his description of how to do Sudoku, a procedure it was rather amazing to see verbalised.
The narrator is not a fan of the growing social media of 2007-11 (his years of employment) but he does spend a lot of time on the internet: forums, Google, Wikipedia, and porn (until he's so shocked by unexpectedly violent porn that he stops dead). Much of life is him on his own, or him and the computer. His social isolation in Dubai probably makes more pronounced his use of professional status and connection as a primary way of describing himself and others. It's quite a cold, cerebral narrative; whilst there's humour and methodical consideration of others' experiences, there isn't substantial fun or warmth here (which is why I've tentatively rounded my 4.5 down not up) - although I only tended to feel something missing when I surfaced from the book, because whilst reading I was buzzing with its resonance both personal and general.
'Dog' has multiple meanings: a dogsbody (he is one, and he in turn employs one of his own), wanting a dog for a pet but not being allowed, being dogged by guilt no matter where he goes, the state of guilt and shame "being in the doghouse" in his former relationship and generally - all subtly augmented by the unclean status of dogs in Arab culture. A sense that whatever you do, you can't help being to some extent bad. I felt the central question of the book to be: At what level does one stop trying and/or self-flagellating and become resigned to things?
(I became aware that I may be more forgiving to this narrator's professional situation than some readers would be because, being so tired, I empathise very readily with inertia and a sense of stuckness even when the subject might actually have the wherewithal to do something about it. But anyway, these days, at the other end of the economic scale from this chap, there are a lot of people doing jobs with a negative social impact, e.g. aggressive telesales, who really have no choice. So although his earnings are many times theirs, similar, yet really more urgent and difficult, dilemmas still occur.)
There is a huge amount to say about The Dog. I have a hunch that critics will be calling this an Important Book. Another thing I've not gone into yet is the religious theme which plays out in the denoument, more obvious when added to the narrator's probable Christian name. Although it's only 240 pages, this book has enough substance to launch a thousand essays. However I am not sure that average undergrads would get so much out of it: it speaks very much to and of the sense of loserishness that hits in the second half of one's thirties if adrift without an intact long-term partnership and / or offspring, or at the very least an actual divorce. And its intricate prison of work and consumerist dilemmas is most vivid with a good few years of different jobs and experiences under the belt, and having heard and thought these things over and over to the paradoxical point of boredom-yet-knowing-they-still-matter.
July 21, 2014
Amazing, but--how can I say this without insulting the general public (I can't)--not for everyone, because it's too smart for most people. Comically philosophical, smart and minimally sarcastic, it solidifies O’Neill’s place among the literary elite. His sentence structure is a marvel in itself: smart almost-run-ons that snowball into brainy, legalese punch lines. Heavy on anecdotal backstory, soft on plot, but constantly entertaining. A New York lawyer immigrates to Dubai--perhaps fleeing a traumatic breakup--to work for the tremendously rich family of a college friend. As the “family officer” in this bizarre desert wonderland, our narrator navigates the strange conflicts signature to modern life. Is his addiction to Googling and Facebooking and Wikiing any more obsessive than all of ours? Is his attachment to his Pasha massage chair so wrong? Has vast wealth and technological development advanced or devolved society’s morality and intellect? The Dog is fantastically funny with deep heart.
August 2, 2014
I see that one reviewer has already described this book as "too smart for most people" - so there, in a nutshell you have it.
One the one hand it is a breathtaking analysis of the Gulf States, coupled with a masterly exploration of the themes of displacement, alienation and the quintessence of No-where/No-one. A re-Kafkaization of the post-modern novel and an intelligent, insightful examination of the Condition of Man, if you will. On the other it is a somewhat meandering, never-quite-amounting-to-a-plot, ramble of a read - but not in the familiar way of Virginia Woolf (nor, come to that, in a truly Kafkaesque way). For one thing, I lamented the absence of a character in whom I could take a more than a slight passing interest let alone love, doubtless some would say that this is the author's point. Stylistically, it smacked a little too much of a lawyerly tone and his increasing use of a collection of closing brackets to tie up all the parentheses at the end of a paragraph, wonderful the first time, paled after a while.
Reading it, I had the sensation that I was looking through a kaleidoscope, one with truly beautiful, enigmatic patterns which could change my life - if only I were able to have got the damn thing into focus properly. Doubtless I will have to wait until someone smart enough can explain it all to me.
One the one hand it is a breathtaking analysis of the Gulf States, coupled with a masterly exploration of the themes of displacement, alienation and the quintessence of No-where/No-one. A re-Kafkaization of the post-modern novel and an intelligent, insightful examination of the Condition of Man, if you will. On the other it is a somewhat meandering, never-quite-amounting-to-a-plot, ramble of a read - but not in the familiar way of Virginia Woolf (nor, come to that, in a truly Kafkaesque way). For one thing, I lamented the absence of a character in whom I could take a more than a slight passing interest let alone love, doubtless some would say that this is the author's point. Stylistically, it smacked a little too much of a lawyerly tone and his increasing use of a collection of closing brackets to tie up all the parentheses at the end of a paragraph, wonderful the first time, paled after a while.
Reading it, I had the sensation that I was looking through a kaleidoscope, one with truly beautiful, enigmatic patterns which could change my life - if only I were able to have got the damn thing into focus properly. Doubtless I will have to wait until someone smart enough can explain it all to me.
August 4, 2016
Never written a review this early into a book, but the writing is absolutely eye watering. I've never read a literary writer whose prose looks so much like programming language -- and by that I mean lots and lots of nesting statements. This is not a good thing. When he's not nesting statements, he's qualifying things that don't need to be qualified. Or bludgeoning you with awkward similes. Is there some kind of symbolism to this? Some kind of awful writing device? I don't know, I haven't read that far.
He's also a fan of the run on sentence where sometimes an entire page is just one long sentence. Here is the opening sentence, I shit you not:
The first thing that popped into my head was, "Is he a native English speaker?" because that sentence is so disjointed as to be absurd. And that metaphor. Is it a metaphor? Or is there some kind of fetishistic diving experience that marries scuba and Disney in some unholy fashion? I'm sorry, but I'm poor like an inner city kid who's barely seen a pool. You'll have to explain your fancy hobby jargon to me.
Then there's the French. French this and French that, with no translation in sight. It's very alienating. First the scuba now the foreign languages. Plus, he's a lawyer quitting his job over a breakup with his girlfriend to work for his billionaire friend's daddy, who apparently runs Zombocom. "At Zombocom, anything is possible! The only limitation is you! At Zombocom, the unobtainable is unknown! Welcome!" How am I to relate to this pretentious wankery?
I get that this is supposed to be satire, but satire is generally, you know, enjoyable. Pithy, even. I don't connect to this guy on any level and his ridiculous problems fail to entertain. Not even the insights he's supposed to be relating about the lives of the rich and douchey move me, and I'm generally a big fan of mocking the excesses of the one percent. Maybe it's because I know very little about Dubai and mostly don't care. I'm not made to care. I'd like to think I'm open to hearing about it, but not from a narrator who conveys thoughts in a way that's all glass and no candy apple.
Most of the time I feel like I'm just not getting the joke. Perhaps I'm not hip enough to understand his "post-modern writing" and how it brilliantly harkens to a bunch of dead author's works. If I were more well-read I could high five myself for every obscure literary reference and maybe feel gratified by the masturbatory experience well enough to like this book. As it is, I just don't get it.
He's also a fan of the run on sentence where sometimes an entire page is just one long sentence. Here is the opening sentence, I shit you not:
PERHAPS BECAUSE OF MY GROWING SENSE of the inefficiency of life lived on land and in air, of my growing sense that the accumulation of experience amounts, when all is said and done and pondered, simply to extra weight, so that one ends up dragging oneself around as if imprisoned in one of those Winnie the Pooh suits of explorers of the deep, I took up diving.
The first thing that popped into my head was, "Is he a native English speaker?" because that sentence is so disjointed as to be absurd. And that metaphor. Is it a metaphor? Or is there some kind of fetishistic diving experience that marries scuba and Disney in some unholy fashion? I'm sorry, but I'm poor like an inner city kid who's barely seen a pool. You'll have to explain your fancy hobby jargon to me.
Then there's the French. French this and French that, with no translation in sight. It's very alienating. First the scuba now the foreign languages. Plus, he's a lawyer quitting his job over a breakup with his girlfriend to work for his billionaire friend's daddy, who apparently runs Zombocom. "At Zombocom, anything is possible! The only limitation is you! At Zombocom, the unobtainable is unknown! Welcome!" How am I to relate to this pretentious wankery?
I get that this is supposed to be satire, but satire is generally, you know, enjoyable. Pithy, even. I don't connect to this guy on any level and his ridiculous problems fail to entertain. Not even the insights he's supposed to be relating about the lives of the rich and douchey move me, and I'm generally a big fan of mocking the excesses of the one percent. Maybe it's because I know very little about Dubai and mostly don't care. I'm not made to care. I'd like to think I'm open to hearing about it, but not from a narrator who conveys thoughts in a way that's all glass and no candy apple.
Most of the time I feel like I'm just not getting the joke. Perhaps I'm not hip enough to understand his "post-modern writing" and how it brilliantly harkens to a bunch of dead author's works. If I were more well-read I could high five myself for every obscure literary reference and maybe feel gratified by the masturbatory experience well enough to like this book. As it is, I just don't get it.
November 6, 2014
Man Booker Longlist? Publisher's Weekly Top 10? Surely not!!
I was really hoping for a book based around the ironies that form modern day Dubai, instead, I got a rambling nonsense of facetious observations, pornography, meaningless words and multi-brackets.
So, here's an example of one needlessly wordy sentence: " I felt ashamed, specifically ashamed, that is, which is to say, filled with shame additional to the general ignominy that is the corollary of insight, i.e., the ignominy of having thus far lived in error, of having failed, until the moment of so-called insight, to understand what could have been understood earlier, an ignominy only deepened by prospective shame, because the moment of insight serves as a reminder that more such moments lie ahead, and that one always goes forward in error."
What pleasure is there in reading such knotted writing?
On the multi-bracket front, a number of sentences had as many as six brackets within brackets. Many words produced 'no definition' in my Kindle dictionary search and the insertion of many French phrases, without translation, was irritating. Some pages were just lists, even a list of e mails that the narrator would like to send to his boss, but never did. Then there was the section about what sort of pornography our hero liked to 'jerk-off' to.
The characters were all unlikable, almost without exception - Ali, the man-of-all-trades was the only one I had any empathy for.
The one redeeming factor was the naming of the fictional tower blocks where the narrator lived - he resides in the area of Privilege Bay, in The Situation, alongside The Statement and The Aspiration, and overlooking Astrominium, which is due to be over half a kilometer in height. These cleverly named blocks promised insights that never materialised.
And what about the Ted Wilson plot line? A fellow diver who seems to have disappeared, leaving behind two wives. This is never resolved, or maybe it's just a warning that the ending of this novel is going to be just as much of a damp squid?
I don't usually slander a book as much as this one, but I found so little to enjoy that I wonder that I actually finished it. A lot of it I skimmed, which I very rarely do.
If you are planning to visit Dubai and would like to read an appropriate book for your travels, please give this one a miss. I am currently reading, and very much enjoying another book based in Dubai, Beyond Dubai by David Millar. This is a book with subtle humour and a wry look at Dubai, but it also looks into the distant past of the Emirates and the people who lived here thousands of years ago, through the archaeology they have left behind them.
I was really hoping for a book based around the ironies that form modern day Dubai, instead, I got a rambling nonsense of facetious observations, pornography, meaningless words and multi-brackets.
So, here's an example of one needlessly wordy sentence: " I felt ashamed, specifically ashamed, that is, which is to say, filled with shame additional to the general ignominy that is the corollary of insight, i.e., the ignominy of having thus far lived in error, of having failed, until the moment of so-called insight, to understand what could have been understood earlier, an ignominy only deepened by prospective shame, because the moment of insight serves as a reminder that more such moments lie ahead, and that one always goes forward in error."
What pleasure is there in reading such knotted writing?
On the multi-bracket front, a number of sentences had as many as six brackets within brackets. Many words produced 'no definition' in my Kindle dictionary search and the insertion of many French phrases, without translation, was irritating. Some pages were just lists, even a list of e mails that the narrator would like to send to his boss, but never did. Then there was the section about what sort of pornography our hero liked to 'jerk-off' to.
The characters were all unlikable, almost without exception - Ali, the man-of-all-trades was the only one I had any empathy for.
The one redeeming factor was the naming of the fictional tower blocks where the narrator lived - he resides in the area of Privilege Bay, in The Situation, alongside The Statement and The Aspiration, and overlooking Astrominium, which is due to be over half a kilometer in height. These cleverly named blocks promised insights that never materialised.
And what about the Ted Wilson plot line? A fellow diver who seems to have disappeared, leaving behind two wives. This is never resolved, or maybe it's just a warning that the ending of this novel is going to be just as much of a damp squid?
I don't usually slander a book as much as this one, but I found so little to enjoy that I wonder that I actually finished it. A lot of it I skimmed, which I very rarely do.
If you are planning to visit Dubai and would like to read an appropriate book for your travels, please give this one a miss. I am currently reading, and very much enjoying another book based in Dubai, Beyond Dubai by David Millar. This is a book with subtle humour and a wry look at Dubai, but it also looks into the distant past of the Emirates and the people who lived here thousands of years ago, through the archaeology they have left behind them.
September 30, 2014
With a heavy heavy disclaimer that Joe O'Neill is an old and good friend, I will say that I am still making up my mind about this book, but there is much that is seriously brilliant here. It is Bartleby for the 21st-century. Also undercurrents of Kafka, the stranger, and remains of the day. A lot to think about before bedtime!
September 18, 2015
This is the story of a man who moves to Dubai to work for a company with incredible wealth but questionable dealings. While it seems like a decent capture of some of the unique elements of the culture and feel of Dubai, a city with 90 percent ex-pats and more money than they know what to do with, I didn't connect well to the unnamed main character. I think that's his problem in general, he doesn't connect with people well including his ex-girlfriend and the many wives of a popular diver.
Part of it was the mispronunciation of some of the words in the audio. Pedagogy as pedagoggy, niche was wrong, and a few others that really jumped out.
Part of it was the mispronunciation of some of the words in the audio. Pedagogy as pedagoggy, niche was wrong, and a few others that really jumped out.
June 9, 2016
Literary Onanism
The smarty-pants headline would be "This Dog is a Dog," and it is true: this is a book that offers virtually no story, no sympathetic characters, no good reason for reading it, only a terrible letdown after the author's brilliant Netherland. And yet it still has Joseph O'Neill's command of the English language, his intellectual honesty, and, in a word, his class. Had I not had my expectations raised by Netherland (I was its first Amazon reviewer and still hold the top slot), I would probably give this novel four stars, but with that comparison in mind, I cannot even rise to three.
I am struck, actually, by the similarities between the two books, as though O'Neill had only one success in him and was striving to repeat it. Where before we had a Dutch-English banker living as an expatriate in New York, here we have a Swiss-American lawyer as an expat in Dubai. Both men are suffering the aftermath of the break-up of long relationships. Both men have high-end jobs and are well-off. Both come into contact with those much less fortunate than themselves; indeed, O'Neill's social consciousness remains one of the most attractive aspects of his writing. Both novels have one or more rich and/or criminal individuals lurking like Gatsbys in the background; here it is the two fabulously wealthy brothers of the Batros family, who employ the unnamed protagonist as a safeguard against malfeasance with the family funds.
Eddie Batros, an old college roommate of the protagonist's in Dublin, hires him because he is the most honest person he knows. Yet it becomes clear that he is the Dog of the title, sent to the doghouse by his former partner for various shortcomings unspecified at the time that gradually become clearer as the book goes on. Indeed, one of the major problems of the book is that while the protagonist continues to act honestly in contrast to many of those around him, we come to see him as more and more of a loser. There is something onanistic about his life, literally as well as metaphorically; in addition to hearing about his bowel habits, biweekly arrangements with a discreet escort service, and addiction to his Pasha Royale X400(tm) massage chair, we learn more than we might wish about his need for self-stimulation several times a week. Indeed, in contrast to New York, which for all its problems is still a living, working city, life in Dubai as O'Neill describes it has something of the quality of onanistic fantasy, the high life as lived with very little connection to realities elsewhere. Can it be a coincidence that while Netherland was built around the game of cricket, as a force binding immigrant communities together, its pale echo here is scuba diving, a solitary sport essentially pursued alone?
Onanism might be a good word for the first-person narrator's use of language. I thought at first that O'Neill's European stylistic polish had merely turned in on itself and become mandarin. Here he is, for example, ironically musing on a world where direct communication is discouraged:
The smarty-pants headline would be "This Dog is a Dog," and it is true: this is a book that offers virtually no story, no sympathetic characters, no good reason for reading it, only a terrible letdown after the author's brilliant Netherland. And yet it still has Joseph O'Neill's command of the English language, his intellectual honesty, and, in a word, his class. Had I not had my expectations raised by Netherland (I was its first Amazon reviewer and still hold the top slot), I would probably give this novel four stars, but with that comparison in mind, I cannot even rise to three.
I am struck, actually, by the similarities between the two books, as though O'Neill had only one success in him and was striving to repeat it. Where before we had a Dutch-English banker living as an expatriate in New York, here we have a Swiss-American lawyer as an expat in Dubai. Both men are suffering the aftermath of the break-up of long relationships. Both men have high-end jobs and are well-off. Both come into contact with those much less fortunate than themselves; indeed, O'Neill's social consciousness remains one of the most attractive aspects of his writing. Both novels have one or more rich and/or criminal individuals lurking like Gatsbys in the background; here it is the two fabulously wealthy brothers of the Batros family, who employ the unnamed protagonist as a safeguard against malfeasance with the family funds.
Eddie Batros, an old college roommate of the protagonist's in Dublin, hires him because he is the most honest person he knows. Yet it becomes clear that he is the Dog of the title, sent to the doghouse by his former partner for various shortcomings unspecified at the time that gradually become clearer as the book goes on. Indeed, one of the major problems of the book is that while the protagonist continues to act honestly in contrast to many of those around him, we come to see him as more and more of a loser. There is something onanistic about his life, literally as well as metaphorically; in addition to hearing about his bowel habits, biweekly arrangements with a discreet escort service, and addiction to his Pasha Royale X400(tm) massage chair, we learn more than we might wish about his need for self-stimulation several times a week. Indeed, in contrast to New York, which for all its problems is still a living, working city, life in Dubai as O'Neill describes it has something of the quality of onanistic fantasy, the high life as lived with very little connection to realities elsewhere. Can it be a coincidence that while Netherland was built around the game of cricket, as a force binding immigrant communities together, its pale echo here is scuba diving, a solitary sport essentially pursued alone?
Onanism might be a good word for the first-person narrator's use of language. I thought at first that O'Neill's European stylistic polish had merely turned in on itself and become mandarin. Here he is, for example, ironically musing on a world where direct communication is discouraged:
Arguably it is a little mad to covertly inhabit a bodiless universe of candor and reception. But surely real lunacy would be to pitch selfhood's tent in the world of exteriors. Let me turn the proposition around: only a lunatic would fail to distinguish between himself and his representative self.OK, the guy is intelligent, and it flatters the reader to be able to keep up with him, but need it be quite so exhausting? And when he applies his legalistic logic to the breakup of his relationship with Jenn (remember, O'Neill trained as a lawyer too), the result is self-parody:
Rather, during this final, frightful argument, she was digging and putting down the conceptual foundtion for subsequent extreme action by her the legitimacy of which in the eyes of the officious bystander, that spirit who cannot be placated but must be, depended, first, on the transformation of the history of our private feelings and dealings into a thing (in the legal sense) from which Jenn might derive (quasi-) proprietorial/contractual rights; and, second, on the license customarily granted to persons claiming to enforce (quasi-) proprietorial/contractual rights and/or claiming to redress a violation of those rights as a justification for actions that would, in the absence of the license, be viewed by the bystander as unruly and deplorable.Towards the end, the narrator takes scraps of eMail or Facebook postings and subjects them to fanatical deconstruction in the manner of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's blogs in Americanah. I did not like them in her book when there was a story to interrupt; I like them even less in his when there is virtually no story at all. Looking back at my review of Netherland, I see that I praised O'Neill for his deeply moving ability to speak from the heart. Where is that heart now?
June 18, 2018
As a fan of Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, and having read some positive reviews of a novel that made the Booker longlist, I came to The Dog with eager anticipation.
But this was a crushing disappointment.
The Dog centres around a nameless banker who has ended up working for a super-rich family in Dubai after the collapse of his relationship.
Without doubt O'Neill nails the soullessness of Dubai. It's a Kafkaesque Neverland, artificial, blank and dispiriting. It has the skyscrapers of New York, but none of its rebel spirit.
But when the protagonist is also soulless it becomes a problem. Soulless narrator + soulless place = soulless novel, and that sucked the life from it.
There is good prose to admire, and O'Neill is witty, so I'd by lying if I said the book didn't occasionally make me laugh, or have qualities you could appreciate, but it has a chronic lack of narrative drive.
O'Neill includes a mystery involving the disappearance of an acquaintance of the protagonist, but it goes nowhere and many of the supporting characters drift in and then out, with little development or consequence.
I am not sure whether we are supposed to have any sympathy with X, our protagonist. He is clearly clever, but is largely a moral vacuum. The details of his relationship break-up, when they emerge, don't cast him in a better light. Tales of his dalliances with prostitutes and penchant for porn are scarcely endearing either.
To me he felt like a sub-Martin Amis creation from the era of Money and London Fields. The prose doesn't crackle like Amis, and to be honest I think the world should have moved on from those amoral, entitled male characters. They certainly no longer hold much interest for this reader.
By the middle of the novel, I felt my life force ebbing away, and although I stuck with The Dog, by the end I was more than happy to bid it a not very fond farewell. O'Neill can write, but he also needs to make sure his reader cares about what's happening.
I can only hope he remembers that for his next novel, because it would be sad to see this undoubted talent produce more mediocrity.
But this was a crushing disappointment.
The Dog centres around a nameless banker who has ended up working for a super-rich family in Dubai after the collapse of his relationship.
Without doubt O'Neill nails the soullessness of Dubai. It's a Kafkaesque Neverland, artificial, blank and dispiriting. It has the skyscrapers of New York, but none of its rebel spirit.
But when the protagonist is also soulless it becomes a problem. Soulless narrator + soulless place = soulless novel, and that sucked the life from it.
There is good prose to admire, and O'Neill is witty, so I'd by lying if I said the book didn't occasionally make me laugh, or have qualities you could appreciate, but it has a chronic lack of narrative drive.
O'Neill includes a mystery involving the disappearance of an acquaintance of the protagonist, but it goes nowhere and many of the supporting characters drift in and then out, with little development or consequence.
I am not sure whether we are supposed to have any sympathy with X, our protagonist. He is clearly clever, but is largely a moral vacuum. The details of his relationship break-up, when they emerge, don't cast him in a better light. Tales of his dalliances with prostitutes and penchant for porn are scarcely endearing either.
To me he felt like a sub-Martin Amis creation from the era of Money and London Fields. The prose doesn't crackle like Amis, and to be honest I think the world should have moved on from those amoral, entitled male characters. They certainly no longer hold much interest for this reader.
By the middle of the novel, I felt my life force ebbing away, and although I stuck with The Dog, by the end I was more than happy to bid it a not very fond farewell. O'Neill can write, but he also needs to make sure his reader cares about what's happening.
I can only hope he remembers that for his next novel, because it would be sad to see this undoubted talent produce more mediocrity.
January 12, 2025
Hace mucho no disfrutaba tanto un libro. Su humor negro tan early 2000s es increíble, y el análisis (con cierta carga histórica) de Dubai como fenómeno es fascinante.
Si, es un libro BASTANTE superficial, pero algo dentro de ese ambiente te hace más perceptivo a lo que dice y a lo que no.
Si, es un libro BASTANTE superficial, pero algo dentro de ese ambiente te hace más perceptivo a lo que dice y a lo que no.
December 14, 2015
The Dog tells the story of a protagonist known simply as X; after a long-term relationship comes to an end he decides to make a change. Leaving New York, he takes an unusual job in a strange new city. Dubai is undergoing major transformations, the city is transforming into the ultimate futuristic city. Our protagonist finds himself in a different culture working as the “family officer” of the unpredictable and wealthy Batros family.
Right off the bat I can’t help but compare The Dog with Bret Easton Ellis’ book American Psycho and not for the reasons you might think. X might be an unlikeable character but he is no Patrick Bateman; well there are similarities but he isn’t going around killing people. Joseph O’Neill has created a shallow narcissistic character, thrown him into a very different culture and watched what might happen. This turns The Dog into a non-violent Ellis book just set in Dubai.
Can we also talk about the name X, not only does this book take its best ideas from Bret Easton Ellis and American Psycho but the protagonists name reminds me too much of the movie adaptation of J. J. Connolly’s novel Layer Cake. For those who don’t know or haven’t seen the movie, there is a character in that known as XXXX. Two connections to other novels and I am not off to a good start with this novel.
Normally I would love a novel with an unlikeable character stuck in in a culture clash but I kept seeing these similarities and it made it difficult. The book tried to make a humorous satire of the situation, playing on cultural differences and linguistics but I was still stuck. Every now and then I found glimpses of that craftsmanship I have heard about but maybe I should have just read Netherland, since that is the book people rave about.
The Dog was long listed for the Man Booker this year but I was assigned this book for book club. I just want it to be clear that I was not reading this book because of the long listing; in fact I was a little disappointed with this year’s list. I would have loved to enjoy this novel but for the most part it felt too similar to other novels. I felt the need to skim through The Dog rather than enjoying the writing and style.
This review originally appeared on my blog: http://literary-exploration.com/2014/...
Right off the bat I can’t help but compare The Dog with Bret Easton Ellis’ book American Psycho and not for the reasons you might think. X might be an unlikeable character but he is no Patrick Bateman; well there are similarities but he isn’t going around killing people. Joseph O’Neill has created a shallow narcissistic character, thrown him into a very different culture and watched what might happen. This turns The Dog into a non-violent Ellis book just set in Dubai.
Can we also talk about the name X, not only does this book take its best ideas from Bret Easton Ellis and American Psycho but the protagonists name reminds me too much of the movie adaptation of J. J. Connolly’s novel Layer Cake. For those who don’t know or haven’t seen the movie, there is a character in that known as XXXX. Two connections to other novels and I am not off to a good start with this novel.
Normally I would love a novel with an unlikeable character stuck in in a culture clash but I kept seeing these similarities and it made it difficult. The book tried to make a humorous satire of the situation, playing on cultural differences and linguistics but I was still stuck. Every now and then I found glimpses of that craftsmanship I have heard about but maybe I should have just read Netherland, since that is the book people rave about.
The Dog was long listed for the Man Booker this year but I was assigned this book for book club. I just want it to be clear that I was not reading this book because of the long listing; in fact I was a little disappointed with this year’s list. I would have loved to enjoy this novel but for the most part it felt too similar to other novels. I felt the need to skim through The Dog rather than enjoying the writing and style.
This review originally appeared on my blog: http://literary-exploration.com/2014/...
December 4, 2014
As with his very popular Netherland, O'Neill plops his protagonist into an unfamiliar landscape, but this novel shares quite a bit in tone with Dave Eggars's Hologram for the King. The Dog is longlisted for the 2014 Booker, and it will be interesting to see if it is chosen for the shortlist. Although it only runs 250 pages, it is dense, as are most interior monologues. Exceptionally literate and well written with much humor and detail, it does run slow at times, but picks right up again with the unnamed narrator diverging with almost Proustian regret over memories generated by current sensations. Recommended, with reservation.
August 26, 2014
I think I might have given this book 4 stars were it not for the intensely aggravating over use of parentheses. No one needs to write paragraphs that end with ")))))).". For one thing, it looks bad on the page. Secondly, it's just a gimmick and serves no real purpose in the telling of the story (although the story itself is actually quite good (and well told, if I am honest (which I normally am (although my friends might disagree)))). See!
A few pages into this book, I thought I wasn't going to like it, but the narrator gradually grew on me. He's not what you call a nice person, and yet perhaps he is. He moves in dubious circles but seems to want to treat people fairly. He worries about some of his bad habits. I found myself rooting for him in the end.
The writing (apart from the parentheses) is clever and often entertaining which makes it a good read: it's just a shame about those parentheses (have I mentioned that bit already?). There isn't really much of a plot, it has to be said, and although the reason for the title is explained in the book, I couldn't help thinking at times that part of the reason might be that it is one long shaggy dog story.
A few pages into this book, I thought I wasn't going to like it, but the narrator gradually grew on me. He's not what you call a nice person, and yet perhaps he is. He moves in dubious circles but seems to want to treat people fairly. He worries about some of his bad habits. I found myself rooting for him in the end.
The writing (apart from the parentheses) is clever and often entertaining which makes it a good read: it's just a shame about those parentheses (have I mentioned that bit already?). There isn't really much of a plot, it has to be said, and although the reason for the title is explained in the book, I couldn't help thinking at times that part of the reason might be that it is one long shaggy dog story.
September 11, 2014
First of all, Joseph O'Neil is not an easy author to read. Some of his sentences are a page long, he loves using brackets and the narrative falls into digressions easily. However if you can take that, then you will find The Dog a very satisfying read. It's not the most savage jab at capitalism I've read but it's definitely the funniest.
The story focuses on an unnamed attorney who is hired to take care of the finances of a wealthy family business, which is located in Dubai. At first things go well but after dealing with Dubai politics things go down pretty easily. Not to mention the digressions about a missing man, the main character's failed relationships and his grappling with day to day living.
At times I was reminded of Martin Amis' Money. O'Neil does share a lot of stylistic traits that one finds with Amis and character wise, there's definitely a bit of John Self in the Attorney.
I firmly believe that literature should reflect the times we are living in and this year's Booker selection is doing a good job of that. At this point The Dog is the novel I find totally relevant with 21st century society.
The story focuses on an unnamed attorney who is hired to take care of the finances of a wealthy family business, which is located in Dubai. At first things go well but after dealing with Dubai politics things go down pretty easily. Not to mention the digressions about a missing man, the main character's failed relationships and his grappling with day to day living.
At times I was reminded of Martin Amis' Money. O'Neil does share a lot of stylistic traits that one finds with Amis and character wise, there's definitely a bit of John Self in the Attorney.
I firmly believe that literature should reflect the times we are living in and this year's Booker selection is doing a good job of that. At this point The Dog is the novel I find totally relevant with 21st century society.
Read
January 22, 2015The voice of this first-person POV story made me want to read, even though very little actually happened in this book until the end. It was worth reading, though, to hear this unusual, intelligent, funny, and idiosyncratic point of view. The story is about an attorney who, distraught over a break-up, takes a job as a kind of assistant to an extremely wealthy family in Dubai. The setting was fascinating. Loved the multiple parenthetical phrases in the stream of consciousness writing.
January 19, 2015
Written like a person who likes to hear himself talk. And talk. And talk. Just because you can does not mean you should. Story - interesting. Thoughts on life in Dubai - interesting. Style - tiring.
January 13, 2016
Literary style can best be described as "legal agreement-ish"
July 31, 2022
I have never liked Dubai. As far as I'm concerned, like Disneyland, it probably shouldn't exist. I was once hired by a UN agency to evaluate a number of humanitarian radio projects it was operating in Africa and Asia. The evaluation took me to the project's administrative centre in Dubai. The radio services were doing exceptionally good work, from Angola to Afghanistan, and my recommendations included expanding most of the services while closing the Dubai offices, which I reckoned to be a waste of funds, as well as too far from the coal face. In the end, the UN agency concerned decided to keep the Dubai office and close most, if not all, of the radio operations.
I view places like Dubai as microcosms of much that is wrong with the world. Joseph O'Neill brilliantly shows the city on the sand for what it is - the flaunting of conspicuous wealth providing no added value to the world we live in.
This intimate and somewhat pornographic (in an amusing way) view of the city, running concurrently with the narrative of the protagonist's miserable and deteriorating personal life fairly accurately reflects my view on what Dubai offers the human condition.
I thank Antony Altbeker for bringing this book to my attention and Geoffrey King for giving it to me.
I view places like Dubai as microcosms of much that is wrong with the world. Joseph O'Neill brilliantly shows the city on the sand for what it is - the flaunting of conspicuous wealth providing no added value to the world we live in.
This intimate and somewhat pornographic (in an amusing way) view of the city, running concurrently with the narrative of the protagonist's miserable and deteriorating personal life fairly accurately reflects my view on what Dubai offers the human condition.
I thank Antony Altbeker for bringing this book to my attention and Geoffrey King for giving it to me.
December 24, 2023
Akin to the acclaimed TV series “The Office”, this book takes a thin veneer of silliness and sometimes banality to hide a heartfelt sincerity in the protagonist. This results in a balance taking the reader through the story in perfect harmony and maintaining tension compellingly. I don’t see how this book could have been written better in any way.
November 30, 2014
"To me, this wonderland was the same as any other human place: it boiled down to a bunch of rooms. I had a theory or two about rooms. They were still fresh in my mind, those evenings when Jenn would pace in circles in our Gramercy Park one-bedroom in order to dramatize the one-bedroom's long-term impracticality and reinforce the analysis she was offering, namely that all would be well if she and I, first, mentally let go of our apartment, the historic and rent-stabilized location of our love; second, acknowledged that it made sense to buy a place that would more readily accomodate the kid or kids who, in contradiction to her earlier feelings on the matter, Jenn now definitely felt ready to try to have; and accordingly third, that all would be well as soon as we got ourselves a place with more rooms. I must have said little. I certainly failed to mention the following insight: if you cannot identify a single room in the world entry into which will make you joyful--if you cannot point to a particular actual or imagined room, among the billions of rooms in the world, and state truthfully, Inside that room I will find joy--well, then you have found a useful measure of where you stand in the matter of joy. And in the matter of rooms too."
April 18, 2015
An unnamed guy breaks up with his girlfriend and accepts a job as a lawyer for a wealthy family in Dubai. I was hoping to read about cultural misadventures or a beautiful Lost in Translation type of experience, but the narrative is an anxiety-filled rant. The lawyer spends his days shuffling papers, stamping documents, and babysitting an intern (one of his boss's useless kids). He obsesses over his neighbor's disappearance and imagines all kinds of scenarios about the missing man's life for no reason. His speculations ramble on and on. The most boring part were pages and pages of legal brainstorming for language and disclaimers to eliminate liability and responsibility for anything that might go wrong. Very tedious.
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January 4, 2015
Lots of tell and very little show. An avalanche of superficial insights by a white male protagonist living in luxury in Dubai, having stumbled into an overpaid job. It's a short book that felt much longer than books triple it's length.
To borrow from a rather apt Washington Post review, "Weighty and inconsequential"..."There’s no denying that every page of “The Dog” is a little masterpiece of comedy, erudition and linguistic acrobatics. The question is: How much of this can you endure? ... “Dog” is closer to the kill-me-now tedium of Jonathan Lethem’s “Chronic City.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/enterta...
To borrow from a rather apt Washington Post review, "Weighty and inconsequential"..."There’s no denying that every page of “The Dog” is a little masterpiece of comedy, erudition and linguistic acrobatics. The question is: How much of this can you endure? ... “Dog” is closer to the kill-me-now tedium of Jonathan Lethem’s “Chronic City.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/enterta...
October 28, 2014
O'Neill (Netherland) has written a new novel about a young, self-absorbed attorney who leaves New York City for a nebulous "family officer" job in Dubai with a wealthy Lebanese family. Juxtaposed against the ultra modern city and life style of ex-pats in Dubai is the old-fashioned Middle Eastern wheeling and dealing of the Batros family. Our protagonist is caught in the middle. Sadly (or not), I didn't care enough about him to read more than 120 pages of this eloquently written but boring novel. So this hardly counts as a legitimate review. I was expecting more from a Booker Award long-list nominee.
November 4, 2014
This was such a disappointment. Netherland was a work of genius full of insight and O'Neill's views on a range of subjects. It was cerebral without being cryptic or overly challenging. I loved the engagement with place. The Dog sets out to be very similar. This time around though the notes struck are those of alienation and displacement. The setting is Dubai which seems to simultaneously fascinate and repel the author and indeed the reader. The narrator is front and central which is unfortunate. This everyman is deeply unpleasant and not someone to spend time with. This book has joined my to be passed on pile.
September 28, 2014
My animosity to this book might be from a personal place, so it's a skewed review. While I found the protagonist believable, and funny, and actually sympathized with him, and his mistreatment at the hands of various others, I felt like he was also a despicable coward. An awful man, who somehow missed out on those most basic tenants of where meaning and value can be mined for in life. I think his wry solipsism was meant to have me in stitches, but no. So, enjoy for others, not for me.
September 4, 2014
Not my bag. Just couldn't get into the story.
I was expecting to, at the very least, find it amusing, (blurbs and reviews have said it was really funny) but alas,
I failed to see the humour. I'm sure it would appeal to someone somewhere.
I am surprised it's on the long list for the man booker prize.
I was expecting to, at the very least, find it amusing, (blurbs and reviews have said it was really funny) but alas,
I failed to see the humour. I'm sure it would appeal to someone somewhere.
I am surprised it's on the long list for the man booker prize.
December 29, 2014
The Dog. A novel set in Dubai. While funny at times and with the occasional insight, the novel is rambling and lacking in focus. Sadly, the book is full of cultural stereotypes and mistakes about Dubai. I think he did most of his research on the internet, not in person.
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