Thursday, September 15, 2011

Book Review: Dog Handling

A Book You Can Buy From Me

Title: Dog Handling


Author: Clare Naylor

Date: 2002

Publisher: Ballantine / Random House

ISBN: 0-345-46539-3

Length: 319 pages, plus an excerpt from the author's next novel

Quote: "She was getting married in a few weeks and the strain was wreaking havoc with her brain and hormones. In short, she wanted to have mad sex with every man who walked past her desk."

With this line on page 2, Naylor gives readers fair warning: The protagonist is not what most romance readers would call a Nice Girl. Actually she's pretty trashy.

The level of the comedy in this allegedly comic romance is consistently trashy; on page 171 the author actually gets away with a joke about a stage being "surrounded by hordes of seamen, or semen, whichever." Since my relatives are Army and my ex-brother-in-law is Navy, I felt no overwhelming urge to throw the book into the nearest incinerator, but you might.

I have bought other allegedly romantic alleged comedies that I thought had no redeeming social value, and discarded without trying to sell them. So this one does, in my opinion, have some redeeming social value...but not much. Specifically, it suggests, more tactfully than you might have expected from the perpetrator of the "jokes" above, that women in search of romance might find more of it if they'd try thinking about something else now and then. You know, back off, stop being so needy, give men a chance to do some of the pursuing...Grandma told you that, but perhaps reading it in a romantic comedy is more fun.

Of course, for the Idiot Girl protagonist of this novel, thinking about something other than her mad crush on one guy (not the long-dumped fiance who made her want to have mad sex with every man who walked past the desk) means thinking about another guy. Which means flopping into bed with him. And although she has a few supportive male friends, some of whom are even heterosexual, all the guys with whom she flops into bed impress me as being inconsiderate, rude, conceited, to the point of being funny but very anti-erotic.

The question that comes to mind is whether today's real twenty-somethings treat each other this way and continue speaking to each other, in London or even in Australia. (In Washington, they'd probably end up taking each other to small claims court.) I hope there is no place on earth where the dating game is played with as much hostility as Dog Handling suggests.

Despite Naylor's courageous, possibly even groundbreaking, introduction of a Fundamental Rule of Practical Feminism into a romance novel, Dog Handling cannot be given full marks for uplifting womankind; the girls are about as obnoxious as the guys. On the other hand, if you're over age thirty, this book will probably help you feel better about being too old to date anyone the age of Naylor's characters.
 
(To buy it here, scroll down to the Paypal purchase button.}
 









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