They Called It Puppy Love

Sunday, June 08, 2003
    • Somewhere deep in the publishing mills of New York City, an editor is massaging his (or probably her) pale, prominent brow and asking, "How the hell did I do that?" That person is the editor of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, a beautiful, sensitive, melancholy novel of exactly the sort that's usually overlooked by the reading public. Except that it wasn't. The Lovely Bones inspired immoderately enthusiastic reviews (including one from this reviewer), sold more than 2 million copies and levitated onto the best-seller lists, where it still sits a year later.

    It would be unfair to compare 88's The Dogs of Babel (Little, Brown; 264 pages) to The Lovely Bones — but it is tempting. Both are by women, both first-time novelists, both from the same publisher. The Dogs of Babel arrives almost exactly a year after The Lovely Bones and with some of the same buzz — both scored Anna Quindlen's coveted endorsement, for example. But while The Dogs of Babel has many of the virtues of its predecessor and will no doubt please many of the same readers, it won't please them quite as much.


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    The Dogs of Babel begins with a death (just like — to belabor the point — The Lovely Bones). Paul Iverson, a 44-year-old linguistics professor, comes home to find that his wife Lexy has fallen from the apple tree in her backyard. Or jumped — he can't tell, and the only witness to her fall is a dog, a large, affectionate Rhodesian Ridgeback named Lorelei. Paul becomes obsessed with finding out how his wife died. He sets out to teach Lorelei to talk so she can tell him.

    This is, of course, nuts, and at some level Paul knows that, but he gets to work anyway, making flash cards and constructing an oversize keyboard so Lorelei can type with her nose. Meanwhile Parkhurst intersperses Paul's quixotic efforts with his recollections (addressed to the reader in a chatty second person) of his romance with the moody, volatile Lexy and an intermittently engaging subplot about a secret cabal of researchers bent on endowing dogs with the power of speech using Gothically gruesome surgical techniques. This is totally implausible, but it helps reduce the novel's Q factor a little — Q for cute and quirky. Lexy and Paul meet cute, at a kitschy yard sale. She makes papier-mache masks for a living; she loves Disney World; she calls phone psychics; she is obsessed with puzzles; and so on. Either you go for this kind of thing or you don't.

    The Dogs of Babel is a neatly, almost perfectly constructed novel, but its flawlessness is also its biggest flaw. It's too pretty: it lacks the messiness of reality, and as a result it feels smaller than life, like a nifty short story spun out to feature length, a tragedy staged in a shoebox. It's the difference between cute and beautiful. What The Dogs of Babel lacks is the raw, sobbing rage that powered The Lovely Bones, that left it with ragged edges, that made it howl and that made it great — and that left readers, reviewers and editors alike blinking back shocked tears, shaking our heads and wondering, How the hell did she do that?