Let’s be real. It’s hard to keep a straight face writing about puppies. Animal behaviourists like Alexandra Horowitz may apply hard science to shed light on why your shiba inu isn’t interested in the television or your corgi mix likes to eat manure. The good poet – John Galsworthy, Rudyard Kipling – will wrest a sigh from the reader’s maudlin breast with paeans to loyal companions long departed. But most dog-crazy writers avoid spilling too much ink on the subject. We’re wary of fashioning sentences that are a prose equivalent of the idiotic high-pitched babble we direct at our animals all day long. (Full family disclosure: my husband routinely cradles our 85-pound Labrador in his arms and sings to her, as he did when she was a puppy, the “Baby Mine” song from Dumbo.) If we’re not sentimental, we’ll surely be unoriginal. It’s like writing about sex. The opportunity to humiliate oneself lurks around every paragraph.
In The Puppy Diaries: Raising a Dog Named Scout, Jill Abramson, a prizewinning investigative reporter and now executive editor of The New York Times, has vanquished the writer’s self-regarding pose. She plunges into the subject of her dog’s first year and comes up with a golden retriever of a memoir. Unaffected, unironic and lovingly goofy, The Puppy Diaries is not for the reader who sees life with a dog as a Booth cartoon. But it should hit the wide, heart-shaped mark cultivated by dog fanciers everywhere unafraid to be heard singing lullabies to the furriest members of the family.
The story of Scout, like Charley and Marley and Merle before him, begins with another dog. Almost invariably, authors of dog books have had previous companions, well loved, who remain lodestars for all things doggy in the writer’s future. “The truth about getting a new dog,” Abramson confesses straight off, “is that it makes you miss the old one.” The old one in this case: Buddy, a West Highland white terrier and the family dog when her children were small, whom Abramson spoiled without apology. When she was The Times’s Washington bureau chief, she gave photos of Buddy pride of place in her office. At home, the dog dined on fresh-cooked salmon and chicken dusted with rosemary. And when he died, Abramson, by now The Times’s managing editor and living in Manhattan, was bereft. Pained by memories, she writes, “I assiduously avoided walks that took me anywhere near the dog run.” When friends suggested that she and her husband, Henry, get a replacement pet, Abramson demurred.
Then, in May 2007, two months after Buddy’s death, Abramson was hit by a truck near her office in Times Square. A broken pelvis, femur and multiple internal injuries kept her bedridden for six weeks. The lengthy rehabilitation that followed included lessons in how to walk again. But once on her feet, Abramson succumbed to depression. Never had she more keenly missed Buddy’s soothing companionship. “Maybe you should think about getting another dog,” her therapist suggested.
Enter, on oversize paws, Scout.
Stupefying sleep deprivation, baffling health concerns, alarming new expenditures, overweening pride. Even the most sophisticated couples are shredded and then reconstituted by the challenges and changes of new parenthood. Bottomless fascination with our objects of love, and the many choices through which we express it, fuel conversations all over city parks and Internet forums.
Like most puppies, Scout is a chewer. And she needs to learn to walk on a leash. So the pack troops off to Puppy Kindergarten. Putting Scout and herself through the paces, Abramson is “hellbent” on helping the dog acquire her American Kennel Club basic puppy manners certificate. “As part of a generation obsessed with getting our kids into the right schools,” she writes with typically unadorned candour, “I recognised I was taking these puppy classes a little too seriously.” Still she’s thrilled when Scout masters “Down,” “Leave it,” “Off” and earns her coveted diploma. Autumn approaches, and Abramson confidently prepares to introduce her rapidly growing young friend to life in the big city.
“Concentrate on what we want,” the puppy teacher Diane Abbott counsels Abramson. “Don’t give attention to what we don’t like.” The advisory could serve as a cornerstone of the “positive training” method endorsed by so many dog professionals. But when what we don’t want is the dog relieving herself in the middle of the Duxiana mattress, trying to swipe a chicken from an outdoor table at Locanda Verde or eating your husband’s prescription glasses, it can be difficult not to give her some attention. Scout’s adolescence – yes, dogs are jerks when they’re teenagers too – coincides with her transition to New York, upending Abramson’s house and equilibrium. By late fall, the dog is more than 60 pounds of obstreperous energy. When Scout barrels into the path of oncoming traffic with Abramson at the other end of the leash, it’s time to consider some other, less sunny, educational approaches. Abramson gets a referral for a dog-training officer called “CujoCop,” who sounds much scarier than he is. Eventually, the galloping, galumphing animal is brought to heel. As a family friend says to Scout, relegating her naughty impulses to the back bench of a puppy’s imperative, “You are trying really hard to be good, baby.”
Sentimental notions and flights of extreme anthropomorphism abound in The Puppy Diaries. But Abramson seems confident of her congenial audience. And the true happiness she expresses at making, midlife and post-crisis, a tender new bond with another dog plants a solid bridge over the more gooey footing underneath. At last the question hangs: Can one ever love a second dog as much as the first? The answer is of course the one we knew all along. When Scout is a little more than a year old, Abramson has another accident, taking a bad fall while hiking at Yellowstone National Park. She is again hospitalised and, returning home, is fearful of being knocked about by her canine pal. As the best dogs do, Scout intuits a problem. “I was the patient on pain medication,” Abramson writes, “but Scout behaved as if she were on Valium.” The young dog takes up a vigil at Abramson’s bedside and, in doing so, makes a place all her own.
THE PUPPY DIARIES
Raising a Dog Named Scout
Jill Abramson
Times Books/ Henry Holt & Company; 242 pages; $22
©2011 The New York Times News Service
