The Dog-niscient Narrator

The Art of Racing in the Rain, Garth Stein (New York: Harper, 2009)

Imagine your story told from the point of view of someone who loves you unconditionally, who witnesses your public and private moments, your successes and sorrows, who always believes the very best of you and thinks you the center of the universe. Who gives you complete and undivided attention when you are near the treat container. And who knows the intricacies of racing Ferraris.
This is the premise of Stein's The Art of Racing in the Rain, a novel narrated from the viewpoint of "Enzo," the lab and terrier and something mix-of-a-dog who tells the story of his human Denny.  That human has drawn Enzo, named after the founder of the Ferrari line, into the intricacies of auto racing, and into the rough uncharted track of human relationships. There is lust and love--Denny and Eve. Birth and delight--Zoe. And neglect, illness, stuffed toys, death, sex crimes, BMW's, lawyers and in-laws. Possibly redemption and the winner's circle. All this is held together by two literary devices.
The first is the nearly all-seeing, all-smelling dog's viewpoint, a more sympathetic version of the "fly-on-the-wall" technique. Enzo perceives through a moral, emotional filter, but with a few significant exceptions, cannot much interfere with the human plot entanglements. The second is the zen of motorcar racing applied to the emotional stew of life, to mix metaphors. Some of the advice is gnomic--"that which you manifest will come before you"--and other seemingly pragmatic--a car is only as good as its tires. The racing lore matters less when the track is perfect and other drivers slow and well-behaved, and far more when conditions become treacherous, when other drivers spin out of control, when the track itself is badly planned.
The Random Animal is not much for speed--case in point, this novel has been out for a few years. But the racing information was handled with dexterity, and dog-narrator Enzo's view on a number of things were amusingly skewed by a perspective that didn't care how culture critics rank TV shows like The Rockford Files and Colombo with that odd-duck actor Peter Falk. Sometimes the dog-niscient view bolstered by a racing obsession that at first seemed overdone, but what obsession is underdone?
The canine-racing viewpoint did not venture much into the character of dog-life in contemporary society except for some glimpses of a heartless puppy mill owner and discussion of hip dysplasia and animals in pain. In a few cases, the canine-savant acts very much like a puppy, as in this passage when a friend takes Enzo in at a time of family despair and asks the dog to retrieve his own "puppy" from under the sofa: "'Where's your dog?' I didn't want to admit that I still slept with a stuffed animal but I did. I loved that dog, and Denny was right, I did hide it during the day because I didn't want Zoe to assimilate it into her collection and also because when people saw it they wanted to play tug and I didn't like tugging with my dog. And also, I was afraid of the virus that had possessed the zebra."
You'll have to read the book to learn more about Evil Zebra. And Racing in the Rain is often a delightful, but emotionally taut read.  I had and keep some hesitation about the gimmicky dog-niscience, but it allowed a story that could have been a dreary soap-opera to keep an innocence and optimism. There's nothing like a dog's eager hopefulness and a bright red Ferrari.