ETNA, by Paul Yoon
There is a long and delightful tradition of novels being narrated by animals and objects (I’m looking at you, Tibor Fischer, author of “The Collector Collector,” narrated by … a bowl). The choice isn’t everyone’s Milk-Bone, but it is certainly mine. An unconventional point of view changes the sight lines and can dilate what might otherwise have gone unnoticed.
The same can often be accomplished with a very young narrator, though a child’s voice risks being insipid. Less risky might be telling a story from, say, a mature dog’s perspective. And if that story is about a dog — a war veteran — trying to find his way home, driven by a primal need for home, well, you’ve got a tear-jerker in the making. By the close of Part 1 of Paul Yoon’s wonderful new novel, “Etna,” I was weeping freely. I’m not sure anyone needs to hear about the puddle I was in by novel’s end.
So, what makes “Etna” so affecting? One might argue that novels have a more powerful mandate than ever to do the work of making people feel because of the lifeless and robotic dreck we’re all subjected to these days, and that when a novel does make us feel, we feel a lot as a result. One could argue that. One could also just look at how well Yoon has mobilized his dog narrator’s voice to bring freshness to questions that have been well litigated over the years: What does home mean? If we are emotionally displaced, can we ever go home again?
Or one could point to the uncomplicated — though never simple — pathos of watching this dog put on full display how relentlessly self-destructive, stupid and cruel we humans are. Most of us, anyway.
The novel introduces us to a 1-year-old shepherd mix, Etna, who is drafted into an unidentified army. Soon he gets a handler and a job. He becomes a bomb sniffer. And a killer. The first 25 pages of the novel recap at a clip, and with a beautifully condensed sorrow, Etna’s experience of war. It is so depressing:
We walked and ran and trekked and rode in trucks and jumped through open and broken windows and we climbed and ascended and we lived almost every day with explosions and gunfire and houses falling and buildings falling and animals running and everywhere fire and bodies on fire and the earth breaking and breaking deeper.
We lost men. We lost dogs. We met up with more men and their dogs from other units, and we worked and traveled and fought and killed.
The real story of this novel, though, is about the aftermath of war. The wreckage, the grief, the ubiquitous loss. Etna wants to go home, to get back to whatever is left of his coastal farm, and this is where the book evolves into something even more devastating and gorgeous.
Etna picks his way through the emotional carnage of the survivors. In keeping with the staples of a road-trip novel, he meets several characters — both dog and human — and noses through what’s left of their lives. He overhears snatches of human dialogue that suggest the horrors these humans have endured. And he uses his senses — smell, in particular — to intuit their hurt. Etna encounters the dead:
I smelled the old woman lying on the floor on her back with her hands clasped together. Her eyes and her mouth were open.
I smelled her wrist and the cave of her throat and the city dust and the river and the skin particles of other humans embedded in her thousand wrinkles.
Etna wanders through different parts of the country, looking for a dwelling place or a pack or both, depending on your definition of “home.” He meets a doctor and her partner, who are trying to bring medicine to people in the mountains, where lawlessness has taken over. Etna listens in on their conversation, which spans about 10 pages — a considerable length given how short the novel is. The conversation needs to do a lot of work to justify itself. And it does. It plants a seed; it’s a tiny love story and a fable that avoids moralizing. It is also deeply moving.
I won’t tell you whether Etna makes it or not, mostly because who knows what “making it” means anymore. Maybe it means finding humans whose humanity redeems our kind to an extent and learning that we’re not all terrible and that goodness in the world will prevail. Maybe, in the context of this novel, “making it” just means life will go on.
What I can tell you is that the novel does for its readers what Etna says cats do for him: They bring him “out of the landscape, briefly, into a new place — a new level to see the world we were traversing.” I don’t love what I saw, but I definitely loved seeing it.
ETNA | By Paul Yoon | Scribner | 195 pp. | $28
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