Racing in the Rain and Dear Life

I must say “The Art of Racing in the Rain” took me by surprise. I’m a big animal and dog lover (we have a yellow Lab) but I typically don’t read novels about them. I’m especially leery of novels with animals talking or ones narrated from their point of view. It’s just that the books are often pretty bad — totally unbelievable, or silly, or filled with saccharine. I have a lot of respect for dogs and animals in general so I sort of steer clear of novels that make them seem fake or ridiculous, or in which the animals’ owners are irresponsible as well.

So when a friend dropped “The Art of Racing in the Rain” in my lap with a little dog in a flying costume on the front cover (which is a different cover than the one I pictured here) I sort of thought “no way.” However it was a friend and I couldn’t return the book without trying.

Sure enough it’s narrated by a dog, and yet this one didn’t drive me crazy like a lot of the others have. There’s so much more to it and the story and characters stood on their own, pulling me in along the way. Here’s what it’s about:

Enzo is a Lab, terrier mix who loves his human family that lives in Seattle; he thinks when he dies he’ll be reincarnated as a person. His owner Denny works at a fancy auto shop and is an up-and-coming race car driver, Eve, is his wife, and Zoe, their young daughter. Denny and Enzo love to watch old auto racing videos together, gleaning the wisdom these races can transfer to their lives. Yet when Eve becomes ill and Zoe’s taken in by her grandparents, Enzo must back Denny in the most challenging days of his life.

It’s a heart-jerking story and reaffirms the love a dog has for his family and vice-versa. I liked Denny and could see why Enzo thought so highly of him. By the end, I was taken in by the book hook, line, and sinker. I almost lost it on the last few pages, which rarely ever happens. “The Art of Racing in the Rain” is both humorous and touching. I was impressed by author Garth Stein’s depth and commitment to Enzo and his family, a true canine appreciator no doubt. My preconceived qualms about reading this turned out to be unfounded. It’s a human story as much as it is a dog’s story and one that I’m glad not to have missed.

Another book I finished recently was “Dear Life” by Alice Munro. It’s a collection of 14 short stories my book club chose to read and I was pleasantly surprised it offered quite a bit of discussion at our meeting. For a while I couldn’t get my head into the stories. Whether the characters didn’t really speak to me or my thoughts were focused elsewhere, I blame my own distracted reading rather than the clever writing of Alice Munro, who recently won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

I had read and liked her previous collection of stories called “Too Much Happiness,” and I did appreciate many stories in this collection as well though I felt perhaps a bit detached. They’re all a bit dark or unsettling in various ways: in “Amundsen” a girl goes to teach at a tuberculosis sanitarium where she enters into a dismal relationship with the head doctor; in “Corrie” a woman believes she’s being blackmailed for an affair with a married man; in “Gravel” a girl feels guilty for the drowning of her sister; and in “In the Sight of the Lake” a woman with Alzheimer’s dreams about when she got lost on her way to the doctor’s.

Women are often getting the bad end of the stick in these stories. At the end, the collection includes four stories that are “autobiographical in feeling,” Munro says. I’m not sure they’re too revealing but they give a slice of life or impressions of what Munro’s upbringing was like in rural Ontario, where her father was a fox farmer and her mother, a school teacher, before she developed Parkinson’s disease.

I plan to read more of Alice Munro’s short story collections in the future. Eventually I’ll work my way backward through her works from most recent to the past and will get to “The View From Castle Rock” (2006) and “Runaway” (2004) in due time. Hopefully I’ll learn some more from reading from the short story master.

What about you — have you read either “Dear Life” or “The Art of Racing in the Rain”? And if so, what did you think of them?