Recently I went on a date with someone who showed me a forearm scar he got from hopping a barbed wire fence when he was in high school, trespassing an abandoned pool. The cops came, and his friends ran, leaving him with a mark of teenage stupidity and freedom for the rest of his life. To put it bluntly, I couldn’t empathize — I was a good kid in high school; too busy or too bored to seek out weed or parties. Later, our underground bar flooded during a particularly brutal thunderstorm — “Are we gonna die?” I asked my date, imagining a wall of water rushing in on us. He said no, obviously not.
I kept that in mind while reading C. Mallon’s Dogs, a devastating novel filled with rabblerousers and jittery teens who wouldn’t hesitate to hop fences or steal booze, either. In the small town of Carbon, childhood innocence exists so close to teenage cruelty it winds the reader; get used to the muscles in your face dropping from a smile to a grimace in a matter of seconds. Mallon will not spare you — each page drips with the violence of teens fucking, fighting, disabled kids surviving their mothers, surviving getting whacked. Carbon is populated with agents of sadness, micro-stories of trauma Mallon focuses her lens on and moves away after the ache pangs for too long. An epileptic autistic 30-year-old tears Styrofoam apart and shakes hands by “splaying his fingers back out in a pink baby starfish.” A kid playing on the train tracks gets hit, the meat of his legs “fish-mouth, turned to tendrils, shredded,” eventually amputated, then he shops with his sweatpants cut below the stumps, along with his mom, donned in Care Bear scrubs. And then there’s Hal.
He can describe himself. He’s “a battery,” “a pale horse,” “the butchered calf,” “the byproduct,” “a toothed whale,” “a nothing man,” “a submarine,” “strong, whole, long and tough, broad and built out of gristle, and wire, and iron.” He tells his mother, “I didn’t ever want to be this” — after a book full of irreverent images, choose your favorite to fill in what he means. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands, he’s just happy to be there, his body is a postmodern breakable object reconstructed with language, a thing outside of himself — “I was tied to Hal’s track” — and he is also a teenage boy. And like all teenage boys, “I figured probably I was ruined.”
Hal is a tenderhearted horny monster, a boy with emotions too big for his body, a body he weaponizes to avoid speaking. He’s perceptive and doesn’t show it, angry and unfortunately does. He is literary and violent, a bully and a victim. He wears mittens and discusses Snoopy. He sings “You Are My Sunshine” to his dog and swallows pills to kill himself. He cuts his hand on a piece of glass so his mother can bandage it. Kevin makes a horrible joke, so Hal fractures his eye socket and destroys his nose. At a party he gets high on Valium and rests with Cody John in a bathtub, and has his parents bathe and clothe him. Kevin and his goons confront Hal later, spitting in Cody John’s face, so Hal mauls him again. He’s nice enough to spare Kevin another trip to the hospital, with Hal “batter[ing] my bandaged hand onto the concrete a thousand times, white cotton shredded, gone dark with the old grease and filth of the lot.”
Hal is a wrestler, along with the rest of his posse, Dylan, Zachary, Carter, and Hal’s crush, Cody John. Dogs is about one night, when the boys get out of practice and drive up to a mountain after dinner at Hal’s to camp out. Hal and Cody John are intense, doomed — think high school Brokeback Mountain — progressive boys insofar as they tell each other they love each other and closed-off to the point where Hal returns a forehead kiss from Cody John with a punch in the ribs. They haven’t done anything together yet — “I was afraid he’d think there was something ugly about it anyhow” — but the book doesn’t need sex scenes to show how intimately familiar the boys are (there is a backseat blowjob, though).
“He was a cardinal bird,” Hal thinks, “I was a canyon.” He’s a “horsefly lassoed on a thread of gold,” “the lone star, the best thing that I ever had.” If I’m quoting a lot, it’s because Hal’s relationship to himself and to Cody John (and the town, his parents, etc.) goes beyond grounded understanding; he (and Mallon) are wordsmiths. It’s through his actions, rather than his conversations, that he truly knows himself, terse as they may be. His every move is unknown to him; Dogs is as propulsive and dynamic as a well-oiled machine. Hal’s problems stem, of course, from trauma — the shattering reveal of which and subsequent mistakes plunge the book into its darkest, most depressing territory.
Dogs, which has been compared to A Little Life, does what Hanya Yanigihara sets out to do and ends up in a less frenzied place, that being with a fully-formed character and not a pulp of a human (with 500 pages to spare). Yanigihara’s strategy is not morally wrong, as other critics argue, only tiring. Hal’s ending is not sunshiny — as you can expect, it’s the opposite — but his anger and sadness and fears seem earned through the depths of emotions he experiences through his fuck-ups. Same goes for the sympathy I feel for him (I welled up three times). A Little Life felt like a kid stabbing a doll in order to get a reaction from someone; in Dogs, Hal falls through a meat grinder and lives to tell the tale. I’m not told to feel bad for him, I just do from Mallon’s incisive and often stunning prose; it’s brilliant and bodily, pulsing with life and extinguishing it just as quickly.
“They’d make him scared,” Hal imagines the fate of a mistreated dog he sees one day, “They’d shut him in a cage and then when nobody came by for him, when nobody came by to love him and call him their special boy, they’d pin him on a cold table and they’d put him to sleep. There wouldn’t be anybody there with him to smooth his fur flat, hold his chewed ears and tell him that he’d really been the best dog.”
Dogs is a staggering, nauseating display of talent — a hundred arrows into the heart all at once. The journey into the psyche of a troubled, emotional, but good boy, is deft enough to combine the dustbowl hopelessness of Ethel Cain’s discography and the pubescent romantic swells of Call Me By Your Name with a voice that pounces off the page. Mallon punches you in the gut and doesn’t bother to stop when you’ve raised your white flag. When wandering one day, Hal sees the elderly dog from the passage above, tied up in a yard, and sits with him, “Love him the way I was able,” but he doesn’t seem to perceive his warmth. A month later his drunk owner puts two bullets in his head at dawn. “Some dogs,” Hal thinks, “didn’t get what they ought to have got.” Woof.
Dogs is out now.
