Book Review: The Unnameable Beast
Commentary on The Dog by Joseph ONeill
At
a time when many fiction writers, even those considered "literary",
have re-embraced the technique of using straight plot to tell a story,
Joseph O'Neill dares to ignore that trend with the publication of his
latest work. O'Neill, with The Dog, tends more to the
deconstructive method of say, a Nabokov or a DeLillo, possibly even a
Paul Auster. It is the sad tale of the narrator, a counselor-at-law
(unnamed (or unnameable?) although he does use an alias (an ironic one
at that) for his more illicit activities), who, after an ugly break-up
with Jenn, his same-vocationed significant other, accepts a job offer
from an old college chum, now one half of a Lebanese billionaire duo
known as the Batros brothers, which requires relocation from his home
base near New York City to the emirate of Dubai. Being an attorney, our
narrator understandably has a lawyerly way of pleading his case. At
times the prose reads like a legal brief; with lists,
inventories, summaries, delineations, and so on. Literary style aside,
O'Neill has written a cogent commentary on the hazards of our ever more
globally connected, accessible, privacy-stripped society.
Joseph O'Neill |
The Dog
of the title pertains, at least on its face, to our nameless narrator, a
beast-of-psycho-burden-- if you will-- carrying with him baggage for
the ages. His estranged having relegated him to the "doghouse", he
becomes the obedient employee, a chess piece of sorts to a largely
absent grand master, a fiduciary performing little tricks with signatory
authority, his caché of disclaimer stamps and embossers within reach.
In Dubai, he lives in a vast apartment complex called The Situation (evocative of reality television and its causes célebres),
babysits (by that I mean employs as an intern) Alain, Sandro Batros's
undisciplined young son, visits prostitutes and has a pedicure all in
one stop, takes up Scuba, and ponders the life and disappearance of the
elusive Ted Wilson: a fellow American ex-pat, The Situation resident, and deep sea diver.
Joseph
O'Neill peppers the reader with Twin Peaks mystery, dark humor, and a
general sense of disturbing pathos for the state of humankind in the
twenty-first century. He digresses prodigiously throughout and in so
doing is not afraid to use the parentheses as the indicative device (I
counted seven closed parentheses at one digression (which I believe was
the record)). Dubai, with its tax haven status, is the ideal setting if
one wishes to enhance the ever-widening gulf between the privileged
class and their enabling support staff of outsourced labor. On another
level, Dubai, aspires to become, for the dogs of this world, the
ultimate retreat from those nagging home truths, but as our narrator
discovers it only serves to highlight them. His fascination with the
elusory Ted Wilson hints at his desire to disappear in one way or
another. But in the searchable Google-goggled world we currently
inhabit, that task may prove more painful to accomplish than one, prior
to reading this novel at least, may imagine.
Rating: 4.5 Stars
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