The New Yorkers


Posted on Jan 17, 2008
By Martha Garvey

The New Yorkers

by Cathleen Schine

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 304 pages, $24 

 

Available on Amazon.com


Novelist and essayist Cathleen Schine has a dog, a blog, and a new novel, and each is delightful in its own way. 

 

Schine's current dog is apparently a well-behaved Cairn Terrier, but that is not the dog she will be remembered for. In 2004, Schine published a notorious and wrenching essay in "The New Yorker" about her dog Buster, a profoundly difficult dog that Schine and her partner rescued and were unable to rehabilitate, despite 18 months of devotion, training, drugs, and therapy. Cursed by early distemper, Buster tried to destroy everything in his path, and not in the cute Marley way. (You can read more about him here. Bring Kleenex.)

 
Buster lives again in Schine's latest novel, "The New Yorkers," and thanks to the magic of the author's melancholy yet deeply romantic fiction, the dog not only gains another life, he turns a slacker prodigy into an ace dog trainer. Decorated with droll line drawings of dogs by Leanne Shapton, "The New Yorkers" offers a view of one scruffy block on Manhattan's Upper West Side through the eyes of several lonely people and their lovely dogs. The love between the people and the dogs is pure and delightful. The love between people? Mostly as complicated as the sweater one character is knitting for a man who doesn't love her or her placid white pit bull-yet.

 

Yet is the magic word in this longing-filled, optimistic novel. 

 

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