Your September Shelf Improvement choice is…

The Dog by Jack Livings

The book:

The short story form is undergoing

something of a renaissance. Recent
collections from the likes of Hilary Mantel
and Graham Swift have created space (and
readers) for other writers to find their way
around. No longer the unloved footnote of
an author’s oeuvre, short stories are
(perhaps) on their way to being restored to
their former position of Chekhovian (or
Hemmingwayian, although that’s harder to
say) dignity.

Enter Jack Livings and his debut collection,

The Dog. Set in and around contemporary
lives in China, where Livings lived and
worked, these are short, sharp, scintillating
stories. With a gifted eye for the unusual, but
a tight control on realism at the same time,
the effect is a prize-winning collection that is
both strange and believable.

Featuring a wealthy factory owner – once a

rural peasant – watching the aftermath of an
earthquake; a powerful Uyghur gangster
who clashes with his grandson; and a man
struggling to undertake a physically
impossible task - constructing a giant crystal
sarcophagus for the dead leader, The Dog is
a uniquely memorable read.
What the Guardian thought:

The Dog is, among other things, a forceful argument for the role of imagination in fiction
and in life. These short stories successfully put us into other people’s shoes, extending a
gift of empathy. Livings is particularly good at exploring occasions when a character’s
orderly world is disrupted by outside forces: a natural disaster; a theft; a brutal police
beating. In “The Pocketbook”, a young expat student has her ID card stolen and thereby
becomes the unlikely focus of a political protest. In “The Heir”, an Uighur gangster’s
carefully cultivated indifference to the Chinese police is tested to its limit when his
grandson is arrested. These accounts of unsettled lives can be sorrowful, but they are
also often funny. In the collection’s title story, two small-time gamblers are faced with
obscure new regulations that prohibit them from owning a racing dog. In the hope of
avoiding prosecution they decide to eat the evidence. Livings has a great eye for the
absurd.

One of Livings’ interesting techniques is switching point of view at multiple junctures

within his stories, often just for a sentence or two, so that the reader slips out of a
protagonist’s thoughts for an instant and sees him or her from the outside, as others
might. The habit is at first disorienting, but, slowly, the disorientation gains a strength.
By the end of the collection, it feels like an artistic credo of sorts: a belief in seeing things
from all angles. A thief makes life miserable for the person he steals from. We judge him,
based on that quick fact. But a few sentences later, in “The Pocketbook”, we inhabit his
experience as he devours a tube of stolen hand lotion, desperate to assuage his hunger.
Later we’ll see him playing dead as a rival gang assaults him. Livings likes to blur the
roles of victim and perpetrator; in a society as fast-changing as China, he seems to say,
there is no single story.

Livings has spent time studying and teaching in China, but it is still a gutsy move for an
American writer to build his first work of fiction around the imagined lives of people in a
foreign land. Like his characters, he seems to find something productive in being an
outsider. His longest story, “The Crystal Sarcophagus”, is about a group of glassworkers
trying to build an enormous, earthquake-proof crystal coffin for the body of Chairman
Mao. Their brief is to break the laws of physics. They must show that the unimaginable is
imaginable after all. What these workers achieve at the end of their project is a thing of
risky, crystalline brilliance, a perfect feat of invention and exactitude, and those qualities
are shared by the best stories in this collection. The Dog is a book of extraordinary power.

Jonathan Lee

Read the full review:

www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/16/the-dog-jack-livings-review-debut-short-
story-collection-china

If you liked this, then try:

• 10:04 by Ben Lerner

• I Am China by Xiaolu Guo
• Best British Short Stories 2015 edited by Nicholas Royle

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