Oscar, a sweet, lumbering 70-pound lab mix who makes his home in the Hudson Valley, is having a brush with literary fame. In March, he was the star of a moving tribute in the essay collection “The Best Dog in the World.” Now he is the inspiration for a new novel, “Etna,” out from Scribner this week.
But Oscar is much too busy angling for treats, walks and belly rubs from the writer Paul Yoon, the man responsible for both the essay and the book, to notice.
“Etna,” Yoon’s sixth work of fiction, is about a combat dog trying to make his way home after a devastating war, and the story is told in first-person from the dog’s perspective. Although the canine character is not Oscar, per se, his spirit animates the book.
“I fell in love with a dog,” Yoon told me in a chic cafe on the main drag of Hudson, New York, when I asked why he decided to write this novel. “I fell in love with Oscar.”
After years of what felt like telepathic communication between them, with both its synchronicities and its limitations, Yoon began to wonder what the world looked like through Oscar’s eyes. “Part of beginning ‘Etna’ was that I was imagining his voice,” he said. “I’m imagining us talking, and he’s telling me a story.”
The story that emerged is harrowing and tender, rendered in Yoon’s lean, lyrical prose. Etna, a mixed-breed shepherd, is plucked as a puppy from his home on a farm near the sea — both the country and the war are unnamed — and trained for combat, learning to kill in self-defense and fiercely protect his pack. After the war, he sets out on an adventure with Odyssean overtones: dangerous obstacles, mysterious characters and unforeseen violence befalling those he loves.
Like his finest literary forebears who have written from a dog’s perspective — Virginia Woolf (“Flush”), John Berger (“King: A Street Story”), Jack London (“Call of the Wild”) — Yoon pulls it off without being treacly or condescending. This is thanks to Etna’s quiet wisdom and to Yoon’s vivid and unflinching picture of the ruin wrought by war.
It helps that Etna can understand everything that’s said by people around him. This was partly a practical choice, as Yoon explains: “I wanted to create a bridge for the reader to experience this world and this journey.” But, he added, “I deeply believe dogs have superpowers and secrets.”
War is the subject that unites nearly all of Yoon’s writing. He’s especially fascinated by endurance in the face of great suffering: “How do we not give up? How do we find little pockets of joy and optimism? And how do we heal and unite?”
Yoon himself has not had firsthand experience of the kind of nation-ravaging wars he writes about. He grew up in the New York area, mostly in Poughkeepsie, with an ob-gyn father and a stay-at-home mother, and he attended the prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy.
But war stories dominated his childhood. His paternal grandparents, Christians living in North Korea, escaped religious persecution by fleeing to South Korea in the early 1950s, with his young father in tow. Both his parents grew up against the chaotic backdrop of the Korean War and its aftermath. They immigrated separately to the United States as adults and met in New York City in the late ’70s.
“Growing up, I was aware that I was a person of color in a very white world, but there was an even stronger feeling of being different because I didn’t have a connection to members of my own family,” Yoon said. His work represents a chance to converse with those unknowable relatives — a conversation that he has now broadened to include his only partially knowable pet.
Yoon lives with Oscar and his wife, the writer Laura van den Berg, in a hundred-year-old house on a leafy street in Hudson, about two hours upriver from New York. From the outside, the house appears narrow, with a front door that is slightly askew. Inside, it is spacious and inviting, in spite of — or perhaps because of — the many accommodations made for 12-year-old Oscar, including an orthopedic bed and several yoga mats laid out to prevent him from slipping.
While the three of us chatted, Yoon and van den Berg doled out tiny bits of cheese to Oscar, and he was mostly rapt, except for the moment when he wandered over and licked my notebook with his giant tongue. (The day before, his birthday, he was treated to a homemade pumpkin peanut butter cake.)
Yoon and van den Berg met at the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference in Vermont in 2004, when they were in their early twenties. Now each has several works of fiction and a bevy of literary prizes behind them, including Guggenheim fellowships and the 2023 Story Prize for Yoon’s “The Hive and the Honey.”
Both have also landed coveted college teaching gigs, he at Williams College and she at Harvard University. They commute from Hudson to their respective jobs, taking turns bringing Oscar with them.
They’ve built a life where they move in parallel writerly spheres, committed to getting good work done while serving as each other’s best early readers.
“With Laura’s feedback, there’s a lot of shorthand,” Yoon said. “She can be very efficient because she’s been reading my stuff for so long.” Of her husband, van den Berg said, “He’s an incredibly rigorous critic, but it’s always delivered with great gentleness.”
Although their writing is very different — van den Berg described hers as “speculative and reality-bending” — they’ve exerted a subtle influence on each other over the years, and they may now be reaching a point of convergence.
Van den Berg’s next novel is her most realistic yet, and Yoon experiments with fantasy for the first time in “Etna,” not just by entering the mind of a dog but in some near-futuristic elements of the world. “Part of that was thinking of Laura’s work,” he said, and deciding, “I have the courage to try this, too.”
Yoon’s writing has long been respected in the industry, but there’s been more widespread buzz around “Etna” than any of his previous books. The novelist Lauren Groff, a close friend, thinks it’s his best yet.
“There’s something about dogs — their loyalty, their generosity, their steadfastness — that becomes a base line for this commentary on the real violence of the human world,” she said. “And, of course, his prose is exquisite.”
Yoon is pleased by the excitement “Etna” is generating but attributes it, with characteristic humility, to his audience.
“There are a lot of us who love our dogs, and I think people are excited to read a novel from the perspective of a dog,” he said. “We really want to be in conversation with our animals. We want to continue to feel that bond.”
Van den Berg offers another interpretation: “When a writer does something where they’re the most themselves, but they’re doing it in a way they haven’t done before, that’s magic.”
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