DOGWALKER
By Arthur Bradford
Pretty much all you need to know about Arthur Bradford’s Dogwalker
can be gleaned from its epigraph. This isn’t because of anything the epigraph
says - it only suggests, not very eloquently, that it is possible to
imagine various alternate realities for one’s life (a point which doesn’t
have a whole lot to do with the stories in the book) - but rather its source:
the Richard Linklater movie Slacker. This effectively introduces the book’s
subject matter (twenty-something Texas losers) and sensibility (detached,
understated, ironic).
The narrators in these twelve stories are ciphers. They exist merely to
observe the various freaks around them. We might again think of the film
analogy. The narrator records reality like a student film-maker (and I note in
passing the biographical sketch of Arthur Bradford on the dustjacket, which
informs us that his first feature film, a documentary, is about to be released).
In a couple of the stories we even see him using the tools of his (real) trade,
as he gets out his recording equipment to tape what is going on.
The style is deadpan wonder. Bradford’s world is pretty much pure fantasy -
full of talking animals, carnival freaks, monster slugs, mutant dogs, domestic
lycanthropes, etc. - but the narrator is never fazed. Physical and emotional
extremes are scarcely felt. A man named Bill gets run over by a train and cut in
two. His friend finds him on the tracks:
"Hey," said Bill when he saw me. "This is a hell of a place to
be, isn’t it?"
"What happened, Bill?" I asked. I knew it was a stupid question,
but I couldn’t think of what else to say.
"I guess I fell asleep," said Bill. "I sure didn’t expect
this."
The narrator is perfectly in tune with the weirdness of this world. While
deadpan, he is rarely an objective reporter. The snowflakes that fall in his
hand are so enormous "I could have built myself an igloo out of each one of
them." We have the sense that this isn’t hyperbole or poetic license so
much as a strategy for staying sane. Bradford’s use of language accepts a freakishly overhyped world. We see it again in the
story "Little Rodney" when the narrator attacks "a giant python
of extremely large proportions": "It was longer than my car. Its head
was as big as a watermelon, its body thicker than my thigh."
Of course the snake isn’t that big, as he later admits; but then, how often
do you see a pregnant python in the park?
Philip Roth observed, some time ago, the difficulty American writers
of fiction face in capturing the strangeness of American life. How can a
mere novelist, he asked, match the headlines of the morning paper? In Dogwalker
Arthur Bradford tries to avoid this problem by taking an end run through the
supermarket tabloids. It is in the America of trashy headlines, with their
eyewitness reports of monstrous births and the operation of supernatural forces,
that his writing is most at home. The results, as with the tabloids, are
amusing, but never strike us as being the real thing.
Notes:
Review first published online December 4, 2001
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