The Dog

It's hard to recommend a book you think has flaws. As soon as I express ambivalence, I can see people turn their attention elsewhere. And why not? There are so many good books in the world. The Dog quietly came and went last year even though O'Neill's previous novel, Netherland, had (deservedly) been a hit, but now that it's out in paperback, I want to put in a good word. Told by a lawyer living a strange, untethered existence in the strange, untethered city of Dubai, it reads, with all of his polite and perverse self-justifications, as if P.G. Wodehouse was narrating a J.G. Ballard novel. Even though it left me wondering what it added up to, it's stayed in my head ever since as a funny and deeply unsettling vision of the way we live now.