A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog by Dean Koontz


Posted on Oct 28, 2009
By Julia Szabo

REVIEW by Julia Szabo

Hyperion, 2009
288 pages
$24.99

Leave it to Dean Koontz to make a contribution to the "dog lit" genre that's not only a really good book, but a literary event.
 
His numerous best-sellers have been translated in 38 languages, and 2007's "The Husband" is scheduled to be adapted for the screen by Focus Features. Koontz was already at the top of his game 10 years ago, when he and his wife adopted a retired service dog from their pet charity, Canine Companions for Independence. But this book reveals, compellingly and with a lot of charm, what a positive difference a dog's love can make in the life of a person willing to open his mind and heart - yes, even someone as successful as Dean Koontz.
 
Not many household-name authors would cop to still having much to learn, but Koontz does - and he graciously gives credit to his teacher, a Golden retriever named Trixie: "I learned as much from this good dog as from all my years in school." he writes.
 
Even if you've never read him, you probably know that Koontz is a master of the suspenseful and supernatural, and chapter 1, beginning with "a spooky moment around which the entire story revolves," doesn't disappoint. Trixie had been living with the Koontzes for four months when he found himself telling her, "You're not just a dog... You're really an angel." The dog's response, described at length, floored him: "I'm seldom speechless. Trixie's behavior, which seemed to be a reaction to my words, as if she understood every one of them, raised the fine hairs on the nape of my neck and left me mute."
 
Happily, Koontz finds his tongue in time to tell the rest of this page-turner, but it's a different species of suspense story. The only drawback to loving a dog is the cruelly abrupt expiration date on the animal's foreshortened life. So we know that Trixie, like all good dogs, dies in the end; what's important is that this book does not merely end in a mountain of soggy tissues. Rather, the time spent with her and her biographer leaves us with the comforting thought summed up by the title: that every little life is big in its own way. There's greatness in each of us, but sometimes it takes a dog to draw that quality out. 

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