FICTION

TO DANCE WITH THE WHITE DOG by Terry Kay (Peachtree Publishers: $16.95; 179 pp.). Slow and quiet, like the winding down of life’s last years, this novel is a loving eulogy to old age itself. An old man whose wife has just died befriends a strange white dog that is somehow real and somehow a manifestation of his dead wife’s spirit. This short book moves like poetry, and slowly, pleasantly, you learn to care about the old man and appreciate the depth of loss he feels. When he decides to go to a college reunion and spends money to fix up his truck and make arrangements without telling his grown children, they wonder if he’s getting childish and irrational. Suspense builds as he cranks up the ancient vehicle and heads out along the back roads to his past, “safe from the prying, curious eyes of his prying, curious children.” But in a long life that never included much in the way of material success, those same children “were our luxury,” the old man recalls. As cancer, that “mutant cannibal,” invades, he completes the process of letting go. The story is a tender celebration of life, made poignant by death being so close at hand.