Racing in the Rain, mute angels and loneliness

  • Just fin­ished read­ing The Art of Rac­ing in the Rain yes­ter­day morn­ing, just in time for Clemen­tine to dis­prove the author’s con­tention that dogs are clear-thinking, non-judgmental and sympathetic.

    But let’s start off with the good part first. This is a first-person — well, first-dog — nar­ra­tion by Enzo, a lab-mix, about the tri­als and tribu­la­tions of his mas­ter, Denny Smith, and it’s a good read: thought-provoking, warm and well-done. (Fun lit­tle video ad HERE). Denny Smith goes through courtship, mar­riage, devel­op­ing his skill in rac­ing, child-rearing, loss, betrayal, false accu­sa­tion and a har­row­ing legal bat­tle, and Enzo is with him all along: think­ing, feel­ing, bemoan­ing the lack of a voice or oppos­able thumbs with which to lend bet­ter aid. Enzo watches rac­ing videos with Denny and absorbs the lex­i­con and cul­ture. Enzo lets his humans know with a nudge of the nose that he’s there for them, and he lis­tens when they pour out their trou­bles to him. In short, he’s less like a dog than he is like a hairy guardian angel who doesn’t say any­thing and can fetch.

    clem-in-sickness-and-in-health.jpg

    I could’ve used Enzo yes­ter­day. Some pro­longed back pain turned into sci­at­ica, and I had so much pain streak­ing from my lower back down my left leg that I could hardly walk. My day was a series of move­ments from chair to bed to chair, try­ing to find some way to sit, stand or lay that would lessen the pain and allow me to sleep. Greg looked in on me, fussed over me, gave me fore­head kisses and went and got spe­cial sick-girl food at the gro­cery store. Clemen­tine the hound-dog did … noth­ing. She didn’t show me by a glance or a gen­tle nudge that she empathized with my hurt. She didn’t fol­low me anx­iously or look dis­con­so­late or whim­per. She wanted to go on walkies and be fed, and she was afraid of the cane I had to walk with. In short, she was a dog. Clemen­tine is a good dog, but if I wanted an angel, my hus­band would come much closer to the mark.

    I’m not try­ing to shoot down the poetic license in Rac­ing in the Rain; it’s very sweet, and it enables the author to give van­tage about life and hard­ship that he couldn’t do as eas­ily from a human nar­ra­tor. We all wish our ani­mal friends under­stood us so well and were in our cor­ner half so much. But when I read things like this, I usu­ally think that we’re say­ing much more about our own lone­li­ness than any­thing else. We’re all alone on the planet. We’re the only ones in cre­ation that are guided by con­scious thought as much or more than we are by instinct. Ani­mals have their march­ing orders and they’re always about their busi­ness. We sit around wor­ry­ing over things and can’t fig­ure out what life is about. Dogs and cats inter­act with us if we feed them and give us back affec­tion and a fun dis­trac­tion, and of course, work­ing ani­mals allow us to do jobs we can’t do with­out them. But at bot­tom, it’s left for humans to set a course, to decide between good and evil, to look at all the things they could do and fig­ure out what they should do. A really good per­son will develop a cure, invent a machine, teach other peo­ple or go to the moon. A really good dog won’t jump up too much and goes out­doors to poop.

    Cut­ting down this harm­less sort of anthro­po­mor­phism seems as stodgy as tak­ing issue with the whole ‘Fol­low your dreams’ cult, as Steven did HERE. If we were a healthy cul­ture that showed predilec­tions for good judg­ment, mod­er­a­tion and godly dis­cern­ment, I wouldn’t worry about it. But I find myself tak­ing both aspects of our pop­u­lar cul­ture with a grain of salt, and for the same rea­son. We are so deeply inclined towards idol wor­ship. When we don’t care for the Chris­t­ian nar­ra­tive of sin and redemp­tion, we keep putting things into the wrong places and then wor­ship­ing them. Dreams aren’t inher­ently vir­tu­ous, and nei­ther are ani­mals. Both can be sources of inno­cent enjoy­ment. More to the point, both can be used by God, and there are Bib­li­cal accounts to prove it. But the per­son who fol­lows their dreams exhaus­tively will likely end up bro­ken and cyn­i­cal. And the per­son who thinks that their dog will be their angel is bound to be bit­terly disappointed.


    Related posts:

    1. Rain, rain, go away. Because we need a place to pray.
    2. Rainy Sat­ur­day in October
    3. Fr. Schme­mann: the lone­li­ness of Amer­ica, the bank­ruptcy of Europe
    4. When the angels roared
    5. It’s like an inter­net of smell

    June 26th, 2010 | Grace | 5 Comments |

5 Responses and Counting...

  • DebD 06.26.2010

    I tried to read it (book club strikes again) but just couldn’t stom­ach it. There were way too many rolly eye moments “there goes the dog again, telling me how I should live my life.” Silly book. I evoked the “too many books and too lit­tle time” rule and sent it back to the library.

  • s-p

    It is tough to be a cur­mud­geon. It seems that usu­ally the depth of reac­tion is pro­por­tional to the degree some­one has bought into some fan­tasy, and it takes a big­ger stick to whack some sense into them. Its a nasty job, but some­one has to do it. :)

  • Grace

    DebD:
    I can imag­ine hav­ing that response. I was able to hang in there until the mid­point, when I really did feel like giv­ing up on it. That’s the point where we find that the arch-fiends of the story are a stereo­typ­i­cal upper-middle-class mar­ried cou­ple. It’s the kind of car­toon­ish cast­ing that is so for­mu­laic to me, but seems to go unno­ticed to authors, because they do it over and over again in books that are praised as being fresh and novel.

    But I feel like I’m too crit­i­cal of recent fic­tion, so I decided to be a plug­ger and fin­ish it. I’m glad I did; it got bet­ter at the end.

  • Grace

    s-p:
    I don’t mind tak­ing the heat for being a cur­mud­geon — espe­cially with Cur­mud­geo­phan the Recluse to offer so many tips — but I worry that I’m begin­ning to default to it some­times. With most of the new movies I’ve seen, I could write much more feel­ingly about what was wrong with them than what was right about them. I really can’t pick up much new fic­tion (as I men­tioned above). So am I get­ting more dis­crim­i­nat­ing, or just get­ting narrow-minded, or what? I can’t decide.

  • Mimi

    The author is fairly local and I saw him speak a cou­ple of years ago — I’d read the book for Book Club.
    I talked about it on my blog http://mimisbooks.blogspot.com/2009/01/few-months…

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