Dingus Dreaming

Rating:
Summary: Dingus Delights
Review: If you live with dogs, you know how hard it is to keep from imagining them experiencing thoughts and emotions exactly as we do. But dogs are not human beings and we do them no favor by ascribing to them too-human characteristics, thereby rendering them charming but inauthentic. Alex Vardamis knows this, but does it anyway in his thoroughly delightful fable, Dingus Dreaming, the story of a dog who awakens to literacy thanks to a clout on the head from the New York Times.

Dingus dreams of becoming an influential writer of "hell raising op-eds," flirts with the idea of becoming a novelist, but-thanks to the intellectual stimulus of other literary dogs of high Modernism, Haig Jeffers, Charley Steinbeck, and Yukon Buck London among them-he ultimately revels in the quotidian joys of being a dog in canine-crazy Carmel-by-the-Sea. One wonders if Emerson had a dog, because Dingus' begins to sound a good deal like the Sage of Concord. "Too much thought dulls intuition. Book learning," Dingus discovers, "is no substitute for personal experience." Alas for Dingus that personal experience reveals to him the casual brutality of all too many human beings: compassionless neuterers, loutish Saluki beaters, and snobbish devotees of the doggy genome project known as the AKC.

Throughout his awakening, though, Dingus learns that some human beings are almost as pure of heart as the unforgettable Newfoundland Seaman, who led Lewis and Clark across a continent. The steadfast loyalty and unquestioning love of mistress Audrey, show Dingus that not all human beings teach us, in the words of Haig Jeffers, "to be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant, an insufferable master."