Dogs
By Mark Alizart
Translated from the French by Robin McKay
Polity Press, 2019

The annual flood of books about dogs - rescue dogs, support dogs, injured dogs, war-orphan dogs, angel dogs, entrepreneurial dogs, even a dog with the questionable penchant of rescuing cats - is far from being an exclusively American phenomenon. True, the American industry of caring for and pampering dogs racks up staggering numbers in the dozens of billions of dollars, but wherever in the world you go, people tend to love their dogs. 

In 2018 French writer Mark Alizart added to that year’s deluge with his slim meditation Chiens, in which he reflects on the nature of the dog-human relationship and the ease with which it’s always tended to be reduced to ooze and sentiment. That little book now has an English-language translation by Robin McKay, so that monoglot dog lovers can spend an hour basking in a version of Alizart’s singularly Gallic combination of eloquence and hooey. Alizart roams his observations over a wide range of historical antecedents regarding dogs, including the discussion of Charles Darwin: “Darwin’s Origin of Species prompts us to ask whether the domestication of the dog was a mere accident of history, a tumble back down the tree of life, or whether, on the contrary, it was a successful evolutionary strategy,” Alizart (though not, it should be noted, Darwin in any recognizable way). “As the biologist Stephen Budiansky quips, the question answers itself: wolves once ruled over all the forests of the world, but there are only a few thousand left today, whereas there are hundreds of millions of dogs …”

But the price readers pay for these kinds of contextualized observations is the necessity of stepping widely around the aforementioned hooey. This is to be expected from a country so thoroughly marinated in the nonsense of contemporary philosophy, but even so, some passages are very close to perfect monuments of incomprehensibility:

Dogs know our shame: this is their secret and the reason why they say nothing. And it is also, no doubt, why sometimes we can blame them - blame them for knowing so much about us. This is why we prefer to hide them away. It’s the reason why dogs appear so little in our culture - or only as a travesty, in the form of a lion or a bear, symbols of an aspirational, imperial, properly masculine phallus, celebrated in the form of denial, whereas in reality dogs are everywhere, the dog is in us, the dog is us. 

In rough order: dogs neither know nor care about shame; dogs have no secrets; dogs say nothing because they can’t speak human languages; humans don’t now and never have hidden dogs away; dogs are ubiquitous in all human cultures; dogs are never and have never been portrayed as bears or lions; dogs have never been exclusively male, phallic symbols; dogs aren’t in us; dogs aren’t us. Pause to sip some water, then move on. 

Readers are told that Alizart is the pleased owner of a dog, which is naturally heartwarming, particularly if you tell yourself not to speculate on any shames the animal may have witnessed. Dog-book enthusiasts will be intrigued by this inimitable glimpse into one erudite Frenchman’s thoughts on Man’s Best Friend.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Historical Novel Society, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Washington Post, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.