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    The Dog: A Novel
    The Dog: A Novel
    The Dog: A Novel
    Audiobook10 hours

    The Dog: A Novel

    Written by Joseph O'Neill

    Narrated by Erik Davies

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    ***A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK***
    ***LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014***
    ***PWs Best of the Year 2014***

    The author of the best-selling and award-winning Netherland now gives us his eagerly awaited, stunningly different new novel: a tale of alienation and heartbreak in Dubai.
     
    Distraught by a breakup with his long-term girlfriend, our unnamed hero leaves New York to take an unusual job in a strange desert metropolis. In Dubai at the height of its self-invention as a futuristic Shangri-la, he struggles with his new position as the “family officer” of the capricious and very rich Batros family. And he struggles, even more helplessly, with the “doghouse,” a seemingly inescapable condition of culpability in which he feels himself constantly trapped—even if he’s just going to the bathroom, or reading e-mail, or scuba diving. A comic and philosophically profound exploration of what has become of humankind’s moral progress, The Dog is told with Joseph O’Neill’s hallmark eloquence, empathy, and storytelling mastery. It is a brilliantly original, achingly funny fable for our globalized times.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
    Release dateSep 9, 2014
    ISBN9780553545753

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    Reviews for The Dog

    3.5/5

    88 ratings9 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Life in Dubai is different from life in New York. This is one of many lessons the unnamed narrator of Joseph O’Neill’s novel The Dog learns in his time as an American ex-pat in the Middle East. O’Neill’s narrator has gone there, less as a career move than as a salve for the injury (emotional and financial) inflicted by his acrimonious breakup with his lover Jenn, a breakup he instigated when he realized, after years together, that he didn’t want to raise a family with her. The two are employed as lawyers for the same Manhattan firm, but after the collapse of their relationship the close daily proximity becomes an intolerable pressure point that forces him to take drastic measures. Then a chance encounter results in him being recruited for a lucrative job in Dubai as “family officer” for the wealthy and powerful Batros family whose network of businesses has global reach. His responsibilities are fluid and entail looking out for the family’s interests, navigating the intricacies of Emirates corporate law, approving and rubber-stamping documents he can’t even pretend to understand, and (unexpectedly, annoyingly) minding/babysitting the sullen, unambitious teenage son of one of the Batros brothers, who is foisted on him as a summer “intern.” In the meantime, he finds diverting ways to spend his off hours (scuba diving, pedicures, prostitutes). The work is often tedious and anything but fulfilling, giving him plenty of freedom to wonder what he’s doing with his life and obsess over extraneous matters, such the abandoned building site next door to his apartment and the puzzling disappearance of another American ex-pat, Ted Wilson, a scuba diver who’s been christened with the nickname “The Man from Atlantis.” Our narrator also has a lively imagination, and even though he’s lavishly paid and repeatedly assured he’s a valued member of the Batros team, he feels he’s always playing catch-up, operating in the dark and from a position where crucial information is withheld. This is the novel’s central motif. O’Neill’s narrator is The Dog, consigned to internal exile: a friendless state of not knowing, repeatedly missing the point, perpetually on the outside looking in. When he learns of unfortunates known as “bidoons”—stateless individuals who have arrived in various Persian Gulf countries seeking work, who remain for years without papers or citizenship, who labour at menial jobs for a pittance, who belong nowhere but are unable to leave—the parallel with the narrator becomes apparent. O’Neill’s sardonic, high-octane narrative propels a story that is peppered with absurdities and often raucously funny. But numerous digressions and lengthy narrative detours can, and do, test the reader’s patience. In The Dog, Joseph O’Neill seems to suggest that mankind’s moral and intellectual progress has been compromised by a slavish pursuit of wealth and the endless parade of meaningless trivialities that can so easily dominate our daily agenda. But O’Neill is also clever and insightful, which is enough to convince the reader that his book is not just another of those trivialities that we would do well to ignore.
    • 3/5
      The protagonist of Joseph O’Neill’s novel would prefer not to be known by his given name, X. The trouble is that it’s hard to know him any other way. Despite first-person narration, X is inscrutable. And a bit odd. Or at least complicated. He’s got a mixed heritage that renders him one of those few Americans who speak fluent French. His long-term relationship with Jenn has come to an end. His role in a mid-town Manhattan law firm is tenuous (whereas Jen is already a Partner there). He rather suspects people are talking about him. And like his father, whose career consisted in gradually discovering that he was unsuited to whatever employ he was current set, X concludes that it is time to leave town. Fortunately an acquaintance named Eddie offers him a perfect out — employment in Dubai.

      Dubai, as it were, is made for X. It is very much a recent invention, arising like a mirage out of the desert. Its basic functions are all carried out by foreigners, some, like X, ex-pats in lucrative employ, but most merely foreign workers shipped in to take on all the menial tasks. It is a curiously untethered state. And it mirrors, to some extent, the weightlessness that X experiences when he goes scuba diving. It is not, however, conducive to self-exploration or positive action. And so X seems to flutter in and out of existence, as he asserts and immediately doubts himself, qualifies his terms and then immediately qualifies his qualification.

      The challenge for the reader is that X’s untethered history and reasoning make his actions and declarations equally unexpected and unexceptional. You feel as though he might say or do virtually anything, and then when he does, it fails to set any pattern for what might come next. That makes for an uneasy read. I found myself wondering — since all of this is clearly deliberate — what exactly O’Neill was striving for. I didn’t reach any satisfactory insight into that. And so this remains either a brilliantly executed or  fatally flawed novel. You’ll have to decide for yourself.

      Gently recommended for its sheer wilfulness, yet with caution.
    • 2/5
      Having very much liked Netherlands and read the enthusiastic reviews for his latest novel, I was looking forward to reading this. My only reservation was the Dubai setting - not a place I've been keen to visit plus the few middle eastern expat novels I've read have been disappointing (e.g. Hologram for a King - Dave Eggers). And I'm afraid this too disappointed. I read it to the. End even though I was tempted to abandon it halfway through (I very rarely give up on novels).
      The blurb contains a number of adverbs that I would seriously question. To start with 'hilariously anguished'. Very few novels are laugh out loud but comic moments in this were few and far between (although anguished it certainly is). Then there's 'maddeningly contemplative'. Again, I don't take exception to 'contemplative' but I would preface it with 'boringly'. The problem for me was not that this is 250 pages of stream of consciousness first person narrative, but that the person is not very interesting and his language is firmly rooted in corporate lawyer speak which may well reflect his character but does not make for an easy read. Finally, the blurb states it is 'endlessly entertaining'. As I've already said, it seemed endless to me when I was tempted to abandon it but, this time, I'd question 'entertaining'.
      However, maybe it's just me. An awful lot of professional reviewers echo those blurb phrases.
    • 4/5
      Joseph O’Neill won the PEN/Faulkner fiction award for the novel Netherland in 2009. The novel describes the life, in New York, of a man from The Netherlands. In an attempt to acclimate himself to his new land, he joins a cricket club and begins playing with the team. The novel is about finding one’s way and place in a foreign land. He continues this theme in his latest novel, The Dog.

      O’Neill was born in Cork County, Ireland of an Irish father and a Syrian Catholic mother. His family traveled a lot, but they settled in England, where O’Neill became a barrister with chambers in the Temple. He handled business law cases. Since 1998 he has lived in New York City where he teaches at bard College.

      The Dog is a peculiar, yet engaging story of a man distraught over a break-up with Jenn, his partner. He runs into a college friend, Eddie Batros, the youngest son of a wealthy resident of Dubai. He offers the narrator a job as “Family Officer,” which has a vague, but eclectic, list of duties. These duties include anything from babysitting a 14-year-old, Alain, who is struggling in school to approving checks for the family foundation. The name of this narrator is never specifically mentioned, but he refers to himself as “I/Godfrey Pardew.” The story also includes a number of unusual characters, who make his attempt to assimilate into the Dubai culture all the more difficult.

      O’Neill uses long, long sentences with numerous parentheticals. He sometimes closes sentences with as many as 3, 4, 5, or even 6. He writes in one instance, “(In my book, the win-win-win ideal, valuable advance though it is on the mere win-win, does not go far enough. It seems unsatisfactory to restrict the stakeholders in a given transaction to the two transactors plus the inescapable third party, to wit, the planetary/global lot. There is a fourth admittedly subjective and conceptually vague interest at stake, namely the effect of the transaction in terms of the human race’s susceptibility to downfall or glory. And I suspect, uselessly and a little awfully, that the definition there must be a further, fifth plane of moral reality, beyond our animal comprehension, involving interest that transcend even the destinies of our planet and of the human soul. I do not mean the divine or the universal as such. Nor am I mystically hinting at some cosmic good news. If only I were!)” (86).

      An old say goes, “Once a lawyer, always a lawyer.” O’Neill is a lawyer; I/Godfrey Pardew is a lawyer, so inevitability the bony hand of the law guides some of the prose. Pardew also has a fondness for writing email which are requests for clarifications, complaints, and candid opinions. However, he never sends any of these letters. He fails to completely understand the culture of Dubai, and it costs him in the end.

      Pardew’s days consist of shuffling paper, signing a few documents, talking to Alain and his assistant Ali, drinking, scuba diving, and relaxing in his massage chair. While the story in The Dog by Joseph O’Neill does hold the reader’s interest, the meanderings of his mind and sentences, at whose length the mind boggles, did become a tad annoying. Only my wondering at what might happen to him tenuously held me from invoking the Rule of 50. 4 stars.

      --Jim, 6/10/15
    • 5/5
      A funny, sad and very disturbing look at modern life at a man who tries to do right by the world and himself and suffers immensely for it. O'Neil's writing is so without affect as almost to appear effortless, as if the who thing were the saddest funniest email or internet comment post you had ever stumbled across. This is a book you feel as if you have stumbled across even if you have sought it out.
    • 4/5
      Short on plot, this novel is an interior accounting of the narrator's experience in Dubai as retainer for an extremely wealthy family. With long rambling sentences and paragraphs of stream of consciousness (sometimes as many as 5 nesting parentheses!), this book won't be for everyone, but is ultimately well worth the effort. At times funny, at times morose, the direction of the story is pretty clear, but readers will find much to be amused by and to relate to.
    • 3/5
      This was not as easy book. I read it because I read Netherland which was a very good book. The plot focused on a lawyer from New York who escapes to Dubai to manage the affairs of rich billionaires that he has an old friend connection to. The book is given to long intricate narratives and this style is not easy. O'Neill's prose is excellent and his insights and observations are funny. Overall, reading the book was a chore. I appreciate what he tried to accomplish but I realize that this style of book is not my favorite. Had it been longer than 241 pages, I probably would have put it down and not finished. Read Netherland before you read this.
    • 5/5
      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, “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 he 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, lets down his normal reserve, and starts 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.


    • 4/5
      I expect many people won't like The Dog, finding it hard-going. Though filled with wit, insight and humanity, this impressive book takes the enormous risk of a narrative style that brilliantly conveys the mind, profession and plight of its narrator, but does so by dragging the reader through a textual thicket of fearfully legalistic and politically-correct rationalizing. I think many readers will feel almost oppressed, because O'Neill does not let you come up for air (and light) very often. There aren't even chapters, and there are very few breaks, because in the narrator's mind, everything in his descent is connected or part of the whole. And yet it's humorous, intelligent, apt and touching. Bravo. Very few authors would dare this.

      Reading this, I am sure that O'Neill was at one point a lawyer. While we lawyers will find the legalisms, and the sendups of ultra-legalisms, both humorous and accurate, non-lawyers may have a harder time getting through them.

      For me, it's an incredibly rewarding book and a great piece of work. I loved Netherland, and I picked up some echoes of Netherland here, which may frustrate some readers who expect Netherland II. Netherland no doubt will end up appealing to many more readers. But I think The Dog is an even better novel, with more to say and a really original way of saying it. What more can we ask?
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