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manoush
Dec 14, 2014
This is a strangely compelling, even hypnotic story. On the face of it, the premise seems very unpromising material for a novel. A middle-aged lawyer, known only by the first initial of his first name, X., flees a failed office romance in New York City for Dubai. He takes up a dubious job as the legal adviser to a venal Lebanese billionaire family, where he's essentially their bitch (hence the book's title). Working for them puts X. in all manner of degrading situations, and some of the funniest, laugh-out-loud parts of the novel describe X.'s encounter with the family patriarch and his two dysfunctional, corpulent, shallow sons. Out of this thin material O'Neill creates an extremely engaging character. He's a person who's constantly thinking, constantly turning things over in his mind, not content to just follow the herd. The prose constantly switches between deadly legal language, deep philosophical thoughts, and hilarious colloquial expressions. This multi-toned writing is part of the strange and unique charm of The Dog. It's unlike any fictional prose I've read in a while. For some readers it'll perhaps be boring and longwinded, but for patient readers with a taste for ruminative writing, it's a delight. The author is particularly good at challenging orthodoxies of both the right and left. There are some priceless, acid descriptions of Western expats in Dubai, with their smug, unearned sense of entitlement and open racism. But O'Neill reserves equal criticism for the left's knee-jerk condemnation of Dubai and outrage at the condition of foreign workers there. He slams such self-righteous tut-tutting as "nothing more than opportunistic moral hedonism." The adjective "haunting" is overused to describe works of art that have a magnetic pull and refuse to leave you for days afterward. But The Dog truly is haunting, holding you from the very first paragraph describing X.'s hobby of deep sea diving and lulling you into the troubled, fertile psyche of its tragic narrator.