"The Dog" by Joseph O'Neill

 This is a strange book. It was long-listed for the Man Booker prize. Joseph O’Neill, the author, also wrote “Netherland,” which  was accorded much critical praise, and which I greatly enjoyed.

      One review: “Shades of Kafka and Conrad permeate O’Neill’s thoughtful modern fable of exile, a sad story that comments darkly on the human condition…”

      The narrator is a New York lawyer who, after a tormented break-up with his partner Jenn (as she was christened: not short for Jennifer), goes to work for a family of Lebanese multi-multi millionaires named Batros. In fact, he does very little actual work, and when not at work he does very little at his luxury apartment. He sits in his massage chair, watches pornography on his computer, pleasures himself, and any odd thought or fact that crops up leads him to Google the subject to find out more—like the home towns of the Russian prostitutes that he visits under an assumed name or the exact location and history of The Comoros.

      A myriad of facts or experiences excite his curiosity and lead to pages of analysis and philosophizing, not only about the injustices and iniquities of the sheikdom but about broader questions of human morality--in society at large, and in his own psyche and in those of his fellow ex-pats. A stock saying like, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” can lead him to consult (on his computer) several dictionaries to explore the meaning of ‘scorned’ and to analyze the hell out of what the

apothegm means in particular situations.

      The narrator, who is never named, and is known in his law firm as X (the initial of his first name), speaks in a deliberately pedantic and exasperated voice—a voice that does exasperate the reader from time to time.  And the novel can be seen as a prolonged exercise in the complexity of the narrative voice, which seems to have little connection with a real person. Indeed, at the end of the novel, the reader has, I think, no more of a clue who this person IS than he had on the first page, although he certainly knows how X thinks, broods, reasons, cogitates, analyzes, weighs moral issues, dreams, and deconstructs the world.

      But the narrative voice certainly holds one’s attention, and there is considerable humour –LOL stuff, as X would say. And one can only admire the skill and consistency with which Joseph O’Neill maintains this voice throughout the novel.

      Bottom line—well worth reading.

(Lexicological note: obsessively checking, like our narrator X, whether ‘apothegm,’ as used above, meant what I thought it meant--a pithy maxim or a pithily expressed observation—I discovered that the OED gives the definition under “apophthegm,” although it does recognize the alternative spelling. But up pops my spellchecker and suggests: apophthegmatic, apophthegmatize, and apophthegmatist.)