The Review of Contemporary Fiction
The Dogs: A Modern Bestiary by Rebecca BrownJoanne Gass
Rebecca Brown. The Dogs: A Modern Bestiary. City Lights, 1998. 166 pp. $10.95.
A bestiary, the jacket of Rebecca Brown’s novel tells us, is “a medieval book combining descriptions of real or mythical animals with fables designed to teach a lesson.” Fraught with infelicitous typographical and even grammatical errors, the novel nevertheless does fulfill its didactic purpose, as advertised. The unnamed heroine, an “innocent,” lives in a dangerous world where women are the objects of brutality and aggression. Confined to a claustrophobic life of inaction, cosmic guilt, and oppression, she awakens one day to find a Doberman bitch at her door who moves in with her and quickly takes over her life. The dog, which may or may not actually exist, becomes, in a sense, her Virgil and her demon, and she must escape the confinement of her tiny apartment and her sterile and infernal existence to find renewal in the river of rebirth at the novel’s end. The heroine’s dark night of the soul forces her, and us the readers, to confront our own heartless hollowness and to ask how we might remedy the end of the century malaise which we confront. Her solution? We must take matters into our own hands, and, like Candide, we must work to unearth the child within; we must tend our gardens.
Brown weaves fairy tales, a morality play, medieval fable, Christian allegory, and perhaps even a bit of magical realism into her novel with, I think, uneven success. It is not always clear how this generic mélange advances the author’s plan to teach the reader a lesson. Nevertheless, fans of Robert Coover and Angela Carter will find some sustenance in Rebecca Brown, and Ms. Brown’s many fans, who appreciate her terse, understated, fragmentary style, will not be disappointed. [Joanne Gass]