And here I thought Hanya Yanagihara, author of A Little Life, would forever wear the crown of miserabilism but C. Mallon snatches it from her head with Dogs, a blistering novella that increases trauma's intensity if not duration.
Mallon, acutely sensitive to color and light, writes very much like Caravaggio paints except we're in a godforsaken, wide open part of America where blotto is the typical teenage destination. Self-harming Hal has a better reason to get there than his three buddies, including sweet, blond Cody John whose gentleness does not go unpunished. They're all members of the wrestling team, driving around in a junker several nights before Halloween after Hal's mother serves the boys spaghetti and meatballs that he refuses to eat for initially opaque reasons.
I had to put Dogs down more than once because Mallon gets inside Hal's messed-up head so completely that it hurt to read.
I was throwing off some type of unstable heat. Blue hollow down in the center of a butane torch. Bad radiation. Hole-punching scraps out of anyone caught in my radius, lung matter, heart muscle, brain tissue. Pink living brain. I took a part so small nobody noticed it gone. I understood myself to be a crippling weight to carry. I understood myself to be a total nightmare all the time.
Hal isn't wrong; the only solace he finds other than alcohol and pills is Tough Guy, a furry and non-verbal companion animal.
Let's hope the American Academy of Arts and Letters gave Mallon the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction this year for the viscerally poetic quality of his prose, not his unrelenting shame and despair.
We get enough of that already from the newspaper.
