The narrator of this novel, sometimes called X after an embarrassing first name that he never uses and is difficult to pronounce, works in New York in a legal firm and has a long term relationship with Jenn (not short for anything). After a bitter break up with Jenn he accepts a job in the UAE in Dubai from an old friend and is thrown into an expat life. The family he works for have the arrogance of the very wealthy and never answer his emails and provide little support, just a posh office and a large salary. The job is difficult to grasp, boring and certainly doesn't fill his day. The day dreaming and immersion in personal projects will be familiar to anyone who has had a job that doesn't fill the hours you are required to turn up. The reader learns about life in UAE through his relationship with his assistant, Ali, who does not have UAE citizenship, through the young intern that is foisted on him, through prostitutes and through the other expats and scuba diving mates. The luxurious buildings are described, how the financial crash impacted in the UAE, the clear waters and just occasionally he goes outside into the heat. There is a small mystery when a man who lives in his block, called The Situation, disappears and his American wife turns up to look for him. Joseph O'Neill has lots of fun with words, X, Jenn is not short for anything and The Situation are all part of this playfulness but it is also a rambling novel as the narrator meanders through his days, each one not disimilar to the last. I got some sense of Dubai and UAE but a limited version. Overall, despite the obvious cleverness of this novel I didn't find it held my attention and there were no characters I was really attached to. ( )

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. ( )

Really enjoyed this--as with Netherland, more thinking than plot/action, but very funny and the Dubai setting is fascinating. ( )

Strange book. The protagonist, who has no name, takes on the job of overseeing transactions in a company owned by two brothers. One brother is a former classmate, although not a friend.

To do this job, our hero has to live in Dubai. So we learn some interesting things about this strange place of luxury, from how easy it is to get what you want to how easy it is to be thrown out.

Our hero is a lawyer and cautious. Thus he comes up with many ways to proclaim his lack of liability when he signs approvals. He is proud of his carefully-crafted language. For while he generally trusts this former classmate, he doesn't trust his brother.

The story is interesting although fairly straightforward. What is more interesting is the internal life led by the speaker. He ruminates on everything, and speaks in fluent parentheses, often many nested parens and pages with no paragraph breaks.

I had some difficulty figuring out exactly where he stood - was he being sly, clever, or was he genuinely a caring, thoughtful person? There may be a clue in the title, for it is himself, the dog. ( )

Would love to have loved this book because there are moments when it shines like oil, but it just had too few moments, too little consequence (and too many (embedded and unnecessary) parentheses). At times this is very funny and intriguing but it just failed to engage me on the whole. ( )

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. ( )

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. ( )

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 ( )

Sneaky funny

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. ( )

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/2014/10/21/the-dog-by-joseph-oneill/ ( )

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. ( )

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. ( )

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. ( )

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.



( )

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? ( )

3.5 stars ( )