FICTION

COLD DOG SOUP by Stephen Dobyns (Viking: $15.95). Here is the tale: A Xerox worker meets a beautiful amputee at a New York health spa and she invites him home for supper. During the evening, the family dog dies of old age, and Latchmer, the Xerox man, is relegated to bury the animal. Instead, he meets up with a Haitian taxi driver who persuades him not to bury the carcass but to sell it, and the rest of the book is devoted to that endeavor. First they attempt to foist off old bowser on a mad scientist who buys dogs for brain experiments; next they try to sell the remains to a Chinese eatery that uses dog meat in its soups. Failing this, they take the dead dog to a sex club where members perform bizarre rites on the critter’s remains and finally they try, unsuccessfully, to fob it off to a furrier who sells dog skins for clothes. In the end, the dog is simply tossed into the back of a garbage truck. The polite way to express my reaction to this book would probably be to say I ‘didn’t understand it.’ It is macabre, gross and silly, but in fairness to the author, it might be said that here is an almost perfect mismatch between subject and critic--such as might occur if Germaine Greer were given one of Norman Mailer’s novels to review--or vice versa. The assignment editor in this case is not guilty of any mischief, having innocently decided that I might be qualified to pass judgment on this book since I myself had recently written a novel about a dog. But in fact, I like dogs, and find nothing particularly amusing about a story in which they are slaughtered and tortured and abused by the dozens. Stephen Doybns, the author, is described on the jacket flap as a poet, and indeed he has a facility with the language--some of the imagery is quite striking--but I found the Xerox man and his Haitian friend uninteresting and the plot supercilious, and cannot for the life of me figure out why this story was written at all. It might well be that “Cold Dog Soup” will become some kind of cult book for the sorts of people who find Gunter Grass brilliant or who enjoy watching obscure Czechslovakian movies, but regretfully, I found it a bore.