DOGS, by C. Mallon
C. Mallon’s aorta-smashing debut novel, “Dogs,” tells the story of Hal, a teenager who does a good job describing himself, and his friends, when he says, “I mostly wanted to get different all of the time.” This motley crew is a mess of wrestlers who hoover up alcohol and an increasingly potent slew of drugs over the course of an evening while driving around in the tragic beater of a car that belongs to the group’s leader, Dylan. (The tale of how Dylan came to own the car, which opens the novel, is worth the price of admission alone.) As the events unfold, we are drawn into Hal’s tumultuous, darkening world.
Mallon’s prose is masterly — equal parts muscular and brutal, while also tender and mournful. Deep hurt and intensity stand poetically alongside magnificent descriptions of mall parking lots and cigarette-consuming small-town life. Take this account of a young child dressed up for Halloween, who has Hal meditating on his and his ruffian buddies’ own loss of innocence: “The skeleton kid was so little. He didn’t know anything. Most of us there in the car had been that way one time. The skeleton kid would get longer, and tough, and weird, sad, dark and angry.” Hal laments that eventually the kid will become just like the older boys. What a harrowing, yet enviably lean, description of what a debacle it is to turn from a child into a teenager.
Every page of this tight-fist-of-a-novel is filled with similar, sneaky, staccato brilliance. We are stuck in Hal’s head as his brain flits between tactile observations of, and burning emotion about, the chaos that surrounds him. A memory of Hal pulverizing a classmate in eighth grade is told with the same flamboyant confidence and style as his bottomless love for his giant dog, Tough Guy (an adoration so endearing it made me get up and hug both of my dogs with all of my might). Every thought Hal has flows seamlessly into the next, and Mallon’s writing follows suit — there are no chapter or even paragraph breaks in the novel, nor quotation marks, only the occasional pause marked by three diamonds, as if Mallon wants to give readers a moment to catch some small bit of breath.
The post This Tale of Boyhood Is Brutal. It’s Also Unforgettable. appeared first on New York Times.
