The Art of Racing in the Rain

The Art of Racing in the Rain – by Garth Stein

I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but sometime during my lifetime, more and more people tended to start treating their dogs more like family members than actual pets.   It now seems almost blasphemous to only feed your dog dogfood, or make them sleep in a doghouse. It’s more common these days for people to tell you that their beloved canine actually has a favorite t.v. show and/or a favorite flavored latte from Starbucks. This really shouldn’t be all that surprising. Dogs tend to be more loyal than humans and are actually a lot smarter than some people care to admit.  This is the strong appeal of this book. The Art of Racing in the Rain is a story told to us by a dog.  This is, in fact, a very clever book. I’ve never read anything quite like this before, and one comes away with the feeling that this dog’s story just might, in fact, be a lot more realistic that we might imagine possible.

To be fair, though, as good as the “dog telling the story” schtick goes, the actual plot here kind of falls apart about halfway through the book. My guess is that the author fleshed out an excellent story, but realized he still hadn’t quite come up with enough material to justify his publisher’s demands in terms of quantity of pages.  So we actually get, what feels like, an unnecessary coda to the story that kind of brought the whole experience down for me.  This book is a quick read. I was able to finish the entire book in 2 days (in contrast, I read James Clavell’s mammoth “Noble House” right after this one, and that one took me about 4 weeks).  This led me to the conclusion that Garth Stein probably should have killed the second half of this book and placed more emphasis on the first half; maybe fleshing things out further and taking his time.

Our storytelling dog is named Enzo, and we immediately fall in love with him when we meet him as a young puppy. He’s convinced that when he dies, he’ll be reincarnated into a human being for his next life.  Silly, you say?  Well, again, think about how dogs tend to ‘worship’ and follow their human masters everywhere. It’s easy to imagine that they get awfully jealous when we get to do so many fun things, and many of them don’t include pet dogs.  Enzo is adopted as a puppy by a young man named Denny.  Soon, though, Denny gets a girlfriend.  How do dogs generally handle a situation when their single master is no longer single and doesn’t consider them the most important thing in their life anymore?  Then, to make matters more difficult, Denny’s new girlfriend eventually becomes his wife, and a new baby joins the mix shortly after. Life is suddenly getting crowded for good ole’ Enzo.

Yet Enzo really is fine with all of this. It really is touching to see this young family go through the ups and downs of being a young married couple with a new baby through the eyes of a dog.  The dog gets to see just about everything, since people don’t really feel the need to censor themselves in front of their pets.   For those of us that have “been there”, you can’t help but laugh at how observant Enzo is.  The story is funny, touching, sweet, and sad all at once.

As I mentioned though, halfway through the book, the story takes a rather nasty turn.  Ask yourself this: If you were a friend or family member of Denny, how could you possibly treat him the way that these people do after he’s experienced such a life-altering event?  I must be naïve, as I can’t imagine that there are human beings that can be this selfish and cruel towards each other.  So my enjoyment of this story quickly evaporated by this point.  I simply didn’t enjoy the second-half of the story; even if it is told cleverly by a dog.

Since Denny is a race car driver by profession, this book also tends to get a tad heavy on scenes involving races and all the jargon and “excitement” that goes with such a profession.  I found it a tad overbearing.  I guess the author must be a big fan of the sport, which is why we have so much about race car driving littered through the book.  Again, you almost have to wonder if the author was simply trying to pad the pages.

I give the author loads of credit for coming up with such an original way of telling a story.  I only wish that the story, itself, was as enjoyable as the method it was told.  It was, but only to a point. For me, anyway.