Even the Dogs
Author: Jon McGregor
Publisher: Catapult
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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
On a cold, quiet day between Christmas and the New Year, a man's body is found in an abandoned apartment. His friends look on, but they're dead, too, their bodies found in squats and sheds and alleyways across the city. Victims of heroin, they're ghosts in the shadows, a chorus keeping vigil as the hours pass, paying their own particular homage as their friend's body is taken away, examined, investigated, and cremated.
All their stories are laid out piece by broken piece through a series of fractured narratives. We meet Robert, the deceased, the only alcoholic in a sprawling group of junkies; Danny, just back from uncomfortable holidays with family, who discovers the body; Laura, Robert's daughter, who stumbles into the drug addict's life when she moves in with her father after years apart; Heather, who has her own home for the first time since she was a teenager; Mike, the Falklands War vet; and all the others. Theirs are stories of lives fallen through the cracks, hopes flaring and dying, love overwhelmed by more immediate needs. These invisible people live in a parallel reality to most of us, out of reach of food and shelter. And in their sudden deaths, it becomes clear, they are treated with more respect than they ever were in their short lives.
Intense, exhilarating, and shot through with hope and fury, Even the Dogs is an intimate exploration of life at the edges of society—a deeply humane book littered with love, loss, despair, and a half glimpse of redemption—now reissued with a new introduction by Yiyun Li.
TL;DR Review
Written in gutting prose with experimental form and raw emotion, this book is a haunting but incredibly human look at severe drug and alcohol abuse.
For you if: You like to read incredibly written, sad novels (like I do).
Full Review
“The two of them smoking together then, and later, once she’d left, the two of them smoking apart, in rooms a hundred miles away, their fingers yellowing and the memory of each other flaring to life each time they lit up, no matter what they did to avoid it, the drinking and whatever else. The way memories like that end up a part of you, and then pop out again with some movement or some bang on the bone.”
The lovely folks at Catapult reached out to me last month to see if I’d like to read an early copy of this book because they thought it would be perfect for me, and described it thus: “Jon McGregor’s Even the Dogs suspends you in an ocean — if an ocean were a chorus of spirits who carry your grief in a wave. With the exquisite prose that you loved in Reservoir 13 and The Reservoir Tapes, this short novel explores how our stories are connected by something as incidental as a shared emotional experience. Ultimately as hopeful as it is fierce, Even the Dogs is a daring and humane exploration of homelessness and addiction that bears witness to the forgotten and overlooked.”
Obviously I instantly said yes! And they were right: It was perfect for me, because I’m a sucker for beautifully told novels that rip my heart out. Written in gutting prose with experimental form and raw emotion, this book is a haunting but incredibly human look at severe drug and alcohol abuse.
The book is narrated in the second-person plural (“we”) by a chorus of dead former drug users. They follow the progression of another friend’s body as it’s discovered in his home, taken to the morgue, autopsied, and investigated. Throughout, they zoom in and out of the present, also looking at the recent lives of several other friends who knew the dead man, as well as the dead man’s past.
What’s really unique about this book is McGregor’s daring to trust the reader as he switches narrators, jumps to different moments of time (often mid-sentence), leaves sentences hanging in the middle, and otherwise really just behaves like an untethered chorus of spirits lost in time and space. I read the opening chapter twice, to solidify my bearings and get used to the style, but after that, I incredibly never felt lost; he brought me with him with every jump.
This is a group of people who are not looked at often in real life; in fact, most people actively look away. This was even more true ten years ago, and literature was (and is) no different. This book does big work of making us look, and making us look closely. It brings these people to life even in death.
Trigger Warnings
Drug abuse and alcoholism
Suicidal thoughts and attempt
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