As a kid, our public library in the basement of the Methodist church became my second home. However, I considered any visit a bitter disappointment that didn’t result in one or two dog stories in the stack I signed out. Big Red, Old Yeller, Lassie, Lad a Dog, Call of the Wild, White Fang (the occasional wolf was also okay), I loved them all. That experience has continued to affect the adult I’ve become. As I’ve turned to reading, and writing, stories of family, relationships, and, lately, of aging, it’s become clear to me that I’ve never found a story that wasn’t improved by the appearance of a good dog.
Your nephew has been staying with you (temporarily) for the past three years. Your ex moved into a house down the street and keeps forgetting where he lives. Your dog has decided on bachelor number one who lives next door but you prefer number two, the man whose daughter busted up your marriage. And, the last straw, you suspect that your family, ignoring your wish for no fuss, is planning a BIG seventieth surprise birthday party for you.
Who says you can’t have a page-turning charmer of a novel (in which no dogs die), one that will make you laugh, cry, and leave you wanting more, as it addresses aging, dementia, loss, and death? An Invitation to the Party is that book.
You open a novel and begin reading. The author’s voice draws you into a story that leaves you feeling bereft at the end because it’s over. Wanting more, you read all the writer’s other titles, then reread the first one again.
Richard Russo’s Nobody’s Fool is such a book, despite its eponymous main character, the aging loser, sixty-year-old Donald Sullivan, someone whose life is such a mess that his landlord, Miss Beryl, once Sully’s eighth grade teacher, is the only one harboring any hope he may yet redeem himself.
From such unpromising material, Russo crafts an engaging story that has the reader as often laughing as tearing up. An added plus, a Doberman Pinscher named Ralph has a starring role in the novel’s satisfying conclusion.
P.S. This is one time I recommend seeing a film before reading the book simply for the pure pleasure of having in your head as you read, Paul Newman as Sully, and Jessica Tandy as Miss Beryl.
I read Ann Tyler for her unrivaled ability to create heartfelt stories illuminated by humor about family in all its broken splendor.
The trepidatious Macon Leary is our accidental tourist, writer of an advice column full of tips for making travel feel like staying home. He’s lost his son; his wife has left him. He’s back living with his two brothers and sister when Edward, his choleric Welsh Corgi, starts biting people. This bit of bad luck pulls him into the orbit of the irritating, opinionated, big-hearted dog trainer, Muriel, and on a journey back to a life worth living for both Macon and his dog.
Read The Accidental Tourist if your family (or certain members thereof) make you crazy. You will feel seen. (It’s also a terrific movie.)
Discover a beautiful story of what it is to be human from Pulitzer prize-winning Sunday Times bestselling Anne Tyler
How does a man addicted to routine - a man who flosses his teeth before love-making - cope with the chaos of everyday life?
With the loss of his son, the departure of his wife and the arrival of Muriel, a dog trainer from the Meow-Bow dog clinic, Macon's attempts at ordinary life are tragically and comically undone.
**ANNE TYLER HAS SOLD OVER 1 MILLION BOOKS WORLDWIDE**
In Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend a terrible event (a dear friend and mentor’s suicide) results in the unnamed narrator’s acceptance, out of a sense of responsibility, of an unwanted burden (the heartbroken Great Dane, Apollo−the narrator admitting she is more of a cat person).
I love that by book’s end, that obligation turns out to be a precious gift that assuages both their griefs, serving to connect them to the departed one they both loved. Along the way we, lucky readers, get to eavesdrop on the literary discourse of an agile mind attempting to parse the unparsable as the narrator, a writer herself, addresses both the lost (her mentor) and the found (the dog).
Kent Haruf wrote Our Souls at Night as he was dying. What happens in it? Not a lot. It’s much easier to write stories in which things blow up, plot devices creak, and an ending ties everything up neatly. This quiet, elegiac novel is not that.
Addie and Louis, elderly neighbors, begin sleeping together because the nights are long and they are lonely. Her young grandson, Jamie, visits. Louis gives him a catcher’s mitt and brings home a shelter dog, Bonnie. Their grown children interfere. Complications ensue. And there are no quotation marks to indicate dialogue.
Yet, here I am telling you to go, now, find this book and read it today? Am I crazy? You decide (after you read the book).
P.S. Skip this film. Jane Fonda’s Stepford Wives’ perfection ruins a movie that needed its female beauty defined by wrinkles and gray hair, and an aging, infirm body. (Not possible, you say? I refer you to Jessica Tandy, above.)
Addie Moore's husband died years ago, so did Louis Waters' wife, and, as neighbours in Holt, Colorado they have naturally long been aware of each other. With their children now far away both live alone in houses empty of family. The nights are terribly lonely, especially with no one to talk to. Then one evening Addie pays Louis an unexpected visit.
Their brave adventures-their pleasures and their difficulties-form the beating heart of Our Souls at Night. Kent Haruf's final novel is an…
Last Days of the Dog Men by Brad Watson, another recently deceased, much-mourned (by me, anyway) writer, is a beautifully written collection of short stories that I revisit at least once a year just for the pure pleasure of rereading this southern writer’s tales.
Every story has its dog and yes, some of the dogs die, which ordinarily I find unforgiveable in fiction, people expiring in a book not bothering me nearly as much−and if that last resonates, this book is for you. Alas, dogs do die (but also, thankfully, live) in Watson’s imperfect world and he tells their stories along with those of their flawed humans with empathy and humor in his distinctive southern voice.
Winner of the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the Academy of Arts and Letters and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. In each of these "weird and wonderful stories" (Boston Globe), Brad Watson writes about people and dogs: dogs as companions, as accomplices, and as unwitting victims of human passions; and people responding to dogs as missing parts of themselves. "Elegant and elegiac, beautifully pitched to the human ear, yet resoundingly felt in our animal hearts" (New York Newsday), Watson's vibrant prose captures the animal crannies of the human personality-yearning for freedom, mourning the loss of…
Burne’s been hiding out in the forest since deserting the King’s Guard. Each time he tries to return to the village, he begins to panic. And then one day, he encounters a handsome stranger picking flowers and hides behind a tree instead of talking.
He wants to be braver—and he’s about to get another chance. Because the stranger is Gray, a fairy and master of illusions who’s now following Burne home. And Gray’s got more on his mind than talking. Would a fairy that beautiful ever want someone like him? Stranger things have happened.
Burne hid behind a tree. He wanted to talk to the handsome man picking flowers at the edge of the forest, but he'd only flub it if he tried-he'd stumble over his words and blush bright red. And now the man is gone.
He tries to continue on to the village, but the same thing happens as always: his hands start shaking and panic wells up inside him. What if he runs into the bullies who tormented him in the King's Guard last spring? Ever since he deserted, he has hidden out in the…
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