| Description: |
|
From Amazon
In Feed My Dear Dogs, Emma Richler gives full rein to the quirky fictional voice she introduced in her first book, Sister Crazy. Jem Weiss, the precocious narrator of this rambling, introspective novel, is the middle child in an eccentric literary family. Her father is a crusty Jewish-Canadian writer and her mother, a serene Protestant goddess with a mysterious past. Her four remarkable siblings quote Dickens and Le Petit Prince over breakfast and share a private world of cowboys, Antarctic explorers, and buns in the shape of binoculars. Sound familiar? The Weiss family is, of course, modeled on Richler's own family. (She's the daughter of novelist Mordecai Richler and sister of media personalities Daniel and Noah Richler.) Moreover, the plot of this novel is almost identical to that of Sister Crazy: to wit, the Weiss children spend several formative years in England, then move to their father's hometown of Montreal. So why would anyone--Richler devotees aside--want to wade through this thinly disguised memoir of an idyllic (and idealized) upbringing? Certainly, Jem's narrative voice is unique. Fiercely intelligent, panicked by change, and obsessively fixated on her elusive mother, she filters all her experiences through books and movies. A straightforward anecdote about the family dog, for example, quickly devolves into a discussion of dogs in Tintin and Oliver Twist as well as a potted biography of the Brontë sisters. There is a haunting undercurrent of sadness and loss to these feverish recollections (it's evident not all her family will reach old age), and this occasionally lifts Richler's densely written meditation on childhood into the realm of poetry. But after enduring 500 pages of the Weiss children's clever sayings--not to mention tedious synopses of Hamlet, A Streetcar Named Desire, Le Morte D'Arthur, and the Gospel of John--readers may be excused for thinking it's a lot of self-indulgent dross. --Lisa Alward
|
