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The Dog: A Novel
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Published:
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group 2014
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Description

***A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK***
***LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014***
***PWs Best of the Year 2014***

The author of the best-selling and award-winning Netherland now gives us his eagerly awaited, stunningly different new novel: a tale of alienation and heartbreak in Dubai.
 
Distraught by a breakup with his long-term girlfriend, our unnamed hero leaves New York to take an unusual job in a strange desert metropolis. In Dubai at the height of its self-invention as a futuristic Shangri-la, he struggles with his new position as the “family officer” of the capricious and very rich Batros family. And he struggles, even more helplessly, with the “doghouse,” a seemingly inescapable condition of culpability in which he feels himself constantly trapped—even if he’s just going to the bathroom, or reading e-mail, or scuba diving. A comic and philosophically profound exploration of what has become of humankind’s moral progress, The Dog is told with Joseph O’Neill’s hallmark eloquence, empathy, and storytelling mastery. It is a brilliantly original, achingly funny fable for our globalized times.

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Format:
Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read
Street Date:
09/09/2014
Language:
English
ISBN:
9781101870044
ASIN:
B00HTMCAAA
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Citations
APA Citation (style guide)

Joseph O'Neill. (2014). The Dog: A Novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

Joseph O'Neill. 2014. The Dog: A Novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

Joseph O'Neill, The Dog: A Novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2014.

MLA Citation (style guide)

Joseph O'Neill. The Dog: A Novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2014.

Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
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Jun 12, 2018 16:36:24
Date Updated:
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        JOSEPH O’NEILL is the author of the novels Netherland (which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award), This Is the Life, and The Breezes, and of a family history, Blood-Dark Track.  He lives in New York and teaches at Bard College.

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title
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fullDescription

***A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK***
***LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014***
***PWs Best of the Year 2014***

The author of the best-selling and award-winning Netherland now gives us his eagerly awaited, stunningly different new novel: a tale of alienation and heartbreak in Dubai.
 
Distraught by a breakup with his long-term girlfriend, our unnamed hero leaves New York to take an unusual job in a strange desert metropolis. In Dubai at the height of its self-invention as a futuristic Shangri-la, he struggles with his new position as the “family officer” of the capricious and very rich Batros family. And he struggles, even more helplessly, with the “doghouse,” a seemingly inescapable condition of culpability in which he feels himself constantly trapped—even if he’s just going to the bathroom, or reading e-mail, or scuba diving. A comic and philosophically profound exploration of what has become of humankind’s moral progress, The Dog is told with Joseph O’Neill’s hallmark eloquence, empathy, and storytelling mastery. It is a brilliantly original, achingly funny fable for our globalized times.

reviews
      • premium: False
      • source: John Freeman, The Bostion Globe
      • content: "The Dog is a brilliant satire . . . [O'Neill] has a fabulous ear for language, as good as nearly anyone in American Literature."
      • premium: False
      • source: The Washington Post
      • content: "Every page of The Dog is a little masterpiece of comedy, erudition and linguistic acrobatics."
      • premium: False
      • source: Ed Taylor, Buffalo News
      • content: "The Dog is an amusing, wry, pleasingly odd work of burnished prose and careful emotional spelunking driven by first-person voice and character and setting, which is Dubai. O'Neill gives [protagonist] X the verbal facility of a really smart lawyer and the self-awareness of a David Foster Wallace character. . . this verbosity is wonderfully light-footed and funny, and frequently poignant."
      • premium: False
      • source: Keither Stasklewicz, Entertainment Weekly
      • content: "This novel is often wonderfully droll, especially in its portrayal of the oddities of a city whose 'mission is to make itself indistinguishable from its airport.' Also, always amusing are the protagonist's mentally composed emails, never-to-be-sent missives in which he lists all of his grievances like an office-computer version of Saul Bellow's Herzog."
      • premium: False
      • source: Publishers Weekly (starred)
      • content: "Pitch-perfect prose . . . Clever, witty, and profoundly insightful, this is a beautifully crafted narrative about a man undone by a soulless society."
      • premium: False
      • source: Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
      • content:
        Praise for Netherland

        "Stunning . . . with echoes of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald's masterpiece . . . A resonant meditation on the American Dream."
      • premium: False
      • source: James Wood, The New Yorker
      • content: "Exquisitely written . . . A large fictional achievement, and one of the most remarkable post-colonial books I have ever read . . . Netherland has a deep human wisdom."
      • premium: False
      • source: Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review
      • content: "I devoured it in three thirsty gulps, gulps that satisfied a craving I didn't know I had . . . It has more life inside it than ten very good novels."
      • premium: False
      • source: The Washington Post Book World
      • content: "Elegant . . . Always sensitive and intelligent, Netherland tells the fragmented story of a man in exile--from home, family, and, most poignantly, from himself."
      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        Starred review from June 9, 2014
        As he did brilliantly in Netherland, O’Neill, in his latest, creates a character who is alienated from his home and social class, and who feels dangerously vulnerable in a country in which he lives a luxurious but precarious existence. The unnamed narrator (we do learn that his given name begins with X) fled from his position in a Manhattan law firm after a bad breakup with a colleague. Feeling lucky at first to get a job in Dubai as “family officer” of the wealthy Batros family, the narrator discovers that he must ignore his ethical principles in order to do the blatantly illegal work required of him. Everyone encountered by the narrator is corrupt, except for his assistant, Ali, who is a bidoon—a stateless person lacking basic human rights. O’Neill’s Dubai is “a vast booby trap of medieval judicial perils,” and the narrator gets caught in “one fucking glitch after another.” Gradually, the sordidness of his situation wears down the his psychological defenses. His agitated thoughts, which the author conveys in pitch-perfect prose, become more and more muddled; his asides within asides (indicated by multiple parentheses) veer into philosophical ramblings and recurrent mea culpas, as he accuses himself of “chronic self-misrepresentation and inner absenteeism.” The narrator develops an obsession with the disappearance of another American man, even while his own life cascades toward a dead end. Clever, witty, and profoundly insightful, this is a beautifully crafted narrative about a man undone by a soulless society.

      • premium: True
      • source: Kirkus
      • content:

        Starred review from June 15, 2014
        Lost love impels a New York lawyer to try to change his life with a job overseas in this circuitous, unsettling novel.O'Neill (Netherland, 2008, etc.) returns to his previous novel's theme of displacement as he depicts a man, known only as X., doing legal work in Dubai for a wealthy Lebanese family. He gradually reveals how he and his lover, lawyers in the same Manhattan firm, grew distant and then broke up over the question of starting a family. In the emirate, he shuffles paper, visits prostitutes, has pedicures and provides an informal travelogue on the nouveau riche of his new realm. He ponders the disappearance of another expatriate in Dubai named Ted Wilson, a scuba diver nicknamed the Man from Atlantis after a 1970s TV show about the lone survivor of that mythical civilization. X. learns of bidoons, stateless persons common throughout the Persian Gulf. He hears of an Iranian who runs into visa problems after going through passport control at the Dubai airport and decides to live in its duty-free area. X. himself was born in Switzerland and raised in the U.S. He mulls enlisting in the French Foreign Legion. While the variations of displacement resonate engagingly, the reader must navigate a patchwork of prose styles, from slang to 200-word sentences to syllogistic gobbledygook to deadly legalese. It's as if the narrator is seeking a viable language to communicate from his "inner Robinson," as in Crusoe, "and the inward island on which he must be marooned." O'Neill gets some much-needed comic effects from the linguistic jigsaw puzzle, although he's also capable of outright funny moments-a scene on a yacht includes confirmation that "gratuitous domestic nudity is prevalent among the rich and famous."Shades of Kafka and Conrad permeate O'Neill's thoughtful modern fable of exile, a sad story that comments darkly on the human condition and refuses bravely to trade on the success of Netherland.

        COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

      • premium: True
      • source: Booklist
      • content:

        August 1, 2014
        O'Neill follows his best-selling, PEN/Faulkner winner, Netherland (2008), with a manically ruminative tale narrated by an anxious, lonely, and mordantly funny attorney who leaves New York in 2007 to work for his college roommate Eddie Batros' Lebanese family as trustee of their immense fortune. He moves to the abracadabratroplis of Dubai, where he is installed in an apartment building called, in Kafkaesque mode, The Situation. As our fulminating hero is pressured by Eddie's wayward brother, Sandro, to authorize highly questionable financial maneuvers, he scrambles to protect himself with a shield of prolix disclaimers, becoming a cyber-age Bartleby. Then he's put in nominal charge of Sandro's overweight and underappreciated teenage son. The narrator may be the Batros' dog and a deeply depressed man reduced to interactions with prostitutes, but he does possess high intelligence and linguistic proficiency and stubbornly seeks the ethical way forward, constructing vast word edifices as extreme as Dubai's famously extravagant architecture. O'Neill has created a bravura and astringent tale about conscience, entrapment, and the power and limits of language as the vehicle for morality.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

      • premium: True
      • source: Library Journal
      • content:

        Starred review from September 1, 2014

        O'Neill's previous novel, Netherland, won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and even garnered praise from President Barack Obama; critics applauded the novel for its poignant, postcolonial narrative of New York in the aftermath of 9/11. Here, O'Neill explores the inverse relationship between ethical stricture and our ever-expanding modern conveniences. The first-person narrative unfolds through an unnamed protagonist who relocates to Dubai to assume the role of financial trustee for the wealthy Batros family. When he is not mindlessly responding to emails and certifying documents with a rubber stamp, the trustee spends ample time scuba diving, enjoying massages, and remembering the make and model of each colleague's luxury automobile. When a financial scandal descends on the family, the protagonist finds himself ensnared in legal and moral culpability. VERDICT A humorous meditation on the dialectics of attention and distraction in the modern world, O'Neill's work playfully skewers the global economy of consumption and our abstract notions of responsibility in its perpetuation. [See Prepub Alert, 3/31/14.]--Joshua Finnell, Denison Univ. Lib., Granville, OH

        Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

      • premium: True
      • source: Library Journal
      • content:

        September 1, 2014

        O'Neill's previous novel, Netherland, won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and even garnered praise from President Barack Obama; critics applauded the novel for its poignant, postcolonial narrative of New York in the aftermath of 9/11. Here, O'Neill explores the inverse relationship between ethical stricture and our ever-expanding modern conveniences. The first-person narrative unfolds through an unnamed protagonist who relocates to Dubai to assume the role of financial trustee for the wealthy Batros family. When he is not mindlessly responding to emails and certifying documents with a rubber stamp, the trustee spends ample time scuba diving, enjoying massages, and remembering the make and model of each colleague's luxury automobile. When a financial scandal descends on the family, the protagonist finds himself ensnared in legal and moral culpability. VERDICT A humorous meditation on the dialectics of attention and distraction in the modern world, O'Neill's work playfully skewers the global economy of consumption and our abstract notions of responsibility in its perpetuation. [See Prepub Alert, 3/31/14.]--Joshua Finnell, Denison Univ. Lib., Granville, OH

        Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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***A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK***
***LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014***
***PWs Best of the Year 2014***

The author of the best-selling and award-winning Netherland now gives us his eagerly awaited, stunningly different new novel: a tale of alienation and heartbreak in Dubai.
 
Distraught by a breakup with his long-term girlfriend, our unnamed hero leaves New York to take an unusual job in a strange desert metropolis. In Dubai at the height of its self-invention as a futuristic Shangri-la, he struggles with his new position as the “family officer” of the capricious and very rich Batros family. And he struggles, even more helplessly, with the “doghouse,” a seemingly inescapable condition of culpability in which he feels himself constantly trapped—even if he’s just going to the bathroom, or reading e-mail, or scuba diving. A comic and philosophically profound exploration of what has...

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