The Art of Racing in the Rain: Book Review

One afternoon, when I was in the depths of my angry teenage years, I was sitting in my dad's office, crying with rage and frustration after a fight with my mother. Our yellow lab strolled into the room, walked up to me and buried her snout in my lap. When she looked up at me with her solemn eyes, I felt like she was the only creature at that moment who understood me.

Have you ever really looked into a dog's eyes? I don't mean a quick glance while you were vigorously petting him. I'm talking about a long stare during a quiet moment of reflection or depression. If you've had such a moment, I'm sure you found yourself staring back into the eyes of a wise creature, a creature that seemed to know you, to understand exactly what you were going through.

Garth Stein based his novel, The Art of Racing in the Rain, on this notion. The novel's main character, Enzo, is a golden retriever. The entire novel is told in the dog's voice, and, although it sounds extremely strange as a premise for a book, Stein pulls it off beautifully.

Enzo is a smart being whose greatest frustration in life is not being able to speak. He completely understands the subtleties of human relationships and watches TV to learn about the wider world. He communicates with his owner as best he can by barking and bodily gestures, but feels incredibly limited in helping his owner, Denny. Stein has endowed Enzo with an educated and slightly sarcastic voice, "Gestures are all that I have; sometimes they must be grand in nature. ... I have no words I can rely on because, much to my dismay, my tongue was designed long and flat and loose, and therefore, is a horribly ineffective tool for pushing food around my mouth while chewing, and even less effective tool for making clever and complicated polysyllabic sounds that can be linked together to form sentences."

Enzo's erudite tone works because he still has the concerns of a dog mixed in with his lofty observations about his owner's family. He pees on the floor, and he chases squirrels and birds. He also perceives disease and certain animals as mystical forces, giving the novel a touch of magical realism.

But this is much more than a novel with a clever gimmick of having a dog as narrator. The Art of Racing in the Rain also has a gripping plot involving custody battles, disease, and devious in-laws. Denny, Enzo's owner, is an amateur racing car driver with great aspirations to grow far beyond the car dealership desk job that pays his bills. The novel is studded with wonderful details about car racing history, strategies, and facts.

Dog novels are all the rage these days. While this is a very different book than John Grogan's celebrated memoir Marley & Me, Garth Stein has created a book that will appeal to dog lovers just as much. But it is such a creative premise that it is sure to appeal to a wider audience as well.