Brown’s ‘A Nose for Justice’ goes to the dogs
Talking dogs? Are you kidding me?
It’s not that I don't love animals. I’m a dog owner myself, and I talk to my dogs all the time. But while I feel sure they communicate with each other quite easily, I don’t imagine them having conversations. In English.
And yes, I know plenty of authors have used talking or otherwise anthropomorphic animals as literary devices. I read one of Lillian Jackson Braun’s “The Cat Who ...” books and the cat’s role in that one actually was sort of believable, because it didn’t actually talk but led the protagonist, Lassie-like, to solve the crime. (And everyone else thought the protagonist was a little nutty, which rang true as well.)
“A Nose for Justice” is the first book by Rita Mae Brown that I’ve read, and the talking dogs drove me nuts. Not only do they talk, but their conversations — with each other — are frustratingly banal. To wit:
“ ‘She sat at the desk all day. Boring. Boring. Boring.’ King grumbled
“ ‘She hummed while she did it,’ Baxter added.
“ ‘Humans can’t sing.’ King spoke with authority. ‘They try but who sounds better than a dog? Be honest.’
“ ‘They do rather squeak.’ Baxter agreed, which made King happy.
On the discovery of a body dumped in the desert, we have this exchange:
“ ‘We never see anything like this in New York.’ Baxter was excited. ‘Do people just stick their dead anywhere here in Nevada?’
“ ‘Not unless there’s a problem. They bury everything mostly so no one can get to them.’ King sniffed the corpse. ‘Let’s see if we can pull an arm off and take it home.’
“ ‘Do you think they will want it?’ Baxter didn’t think humans liked this sort of thing.
“ ‘Probably not, but what a prize!’ King grabbed what was left of the hand and pulled.”
Nice.
Brown appears to enjoy doing research, and as the book is set in Nevada and focuses on some obscure bits of Nevada history and the thorny issue of our uncertain future water supplies, it would appear the reader would benefit from that research. That would be the case if the research were presented as background, instead of as long passages of stilted dialog — conversations it’s difficult to imagine anybody having.
On the subject of conversations it’s difficult to imagine anyone having: The protagonist, Jeep, is a woman of undefined sexual orientation, who had both a female and a male as longtime lovers, at times concurrently. Fine. Let’s leave it at that, and maybe get a lesson on unconditional love.
But no. The subject of whether or not Jeep had sex with both of them comes up between great-aunt and great-niece. It doesn’t get graphic, but are you kidding me? How many young adults want to know anything about the sex lives of their elders?
As I worked my way toward the back of the book, I started to wonder why the main storyline and a subplot both remained unresolved, which usually means either that the author will leave us hanging or, even worse, will wrap up those loose ends just a little too neatly. It is, unfortunately, the latter to which Brown resorts.
And she uses the dogs to do part of the wrapping. Without giving anything away I can tell you that the dogs kill a bad guy. A wire-haired dachshund and a German shepherd mix, family pets both, attack a knife-wielding miscreant who is assaulting one of their owners and in less than a page — and without getting stabbed — rip out his windpipe. Yup, rip out his windpipe. Just in case that isn’t clear, one of the the humans who arrives later says, “You can see the bastard’s windpipe.”
Rita Mae Brown is a New York Times best-selling author and an Emmy-nominated screenwriter.
You’d never know that from “A Nose for Justice.”
