"It isn’t that one wants to live for the sake of a dog, exactly, but that dogs show you why you might want to..."

I’m in the middle of teaching The Great Gatsby. As usual, average students are having difficulty with the book so we’re listening to a reading of the novel and following along in the book. (Sidebar: remember when the teacher used to call on the slowest kid to read aloud and it was like experiencing Chinese water torture with bigger vocabulary words? It’s worse when you’re the teacher. So we listen. I call it "modeling appropriate reading strategies.") Then I review my favorite passages and we discuss their importance in the novel. Often, our discussions are what make the book come alive.

One of my favorite images is that of the Owl-Eyed man, a drunken guest at one of Gatsby’s infamous, vacuous parties. He’s been "drunk for a week straight" and has settled himself into his host’s library with hopes of sobering up—not that it works. In his solemn, if not sober, reflection upon his dignified surroundings, he discovers that the books in Gatsby’s library are "a bona fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella’s a regular Belasco. It’s a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop too—didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?" After some discussion, students get it: "He’s a fake!" "He’s frontin’!" "It’s all show, miss!" Although Gatsby has taken the trouble to purchase real books for his library, they are as unused as those in a stage set.

Yes, I explain, when you actually read a book, it’s obvious (snickers usually greet this comment). Back then, the pages often had to be cut apart. Now, you may see a true reader make notations in the margin or turn down particular pages—as I often do. Since I am simultaneously reading Mark Doty’s new book during my study hall duty period, I wave my copy of the hardback at them. It’s roughly 10% larger than when I bought it because of the number of important passages I wanted to revisit—and therefore folded down—before writing this review.

The convergence of any two books in my reading schedule (teaching versus pleasure) often leads to some bizarre associations, but sometimes these unusual links allow me to approach a pleasure reading in a different way. The most obvious connection was, of course, the library quotation. I obviously found Doty’s book thought-provoking since I nearly destroyed the page corners. But deeper is Doty’s true purpose in writing his book.

Dog Years is not Marley and Me—a book I also liked, but for very different reasons. Mark Doty is a poet, and his prose reflects a poet’s beautiful ability to meander into meaning. One of his most important points exemplifies that wondering wandering: "Love for a wordless creature, once it takes hold, is an enchantment, and the enchanted speak, famously, in private mutterings, cryptic riddles, or gibberish. This is why I shouldn’t be writing anything to do with the two dogs who have been such presences for sixteen years of my life. How on earth could I stand at the requisite distance to say anything that might matter?"

Doty argues that dogs never need to rely on the "deformity of words" (actually, a reference to Virginia Woolf’s dog writings). His experiences over the course of his two dogs’ lives make it clear that he’s never needed them to express themselves in familiar phonetics. Doty adopted one of the two dogs when his first partner, Wally, was dying. The couple had moved back to Provincetown to allow Wally some peace as his health began to fail from AIDS-related complications. Beau, the young golden retriever, was an odd choice for a man with so much happening in his world, but Doty recognized the value of the relationship right away. He was a breath of life into a household with a dying man and a second, aging dog.

"One day, when he’s sacked out next to Wally, his back close to Wally’s hips, I see my lover lift his right hand—the hand that he can’t use to feed himself anymore—and bring it through the air, with intense deliberation, to rest on Beau’s golden flanks. I take a picture of that gesture, because that’s the way I want to remember him. Maybe the last thing he ever did with that hand, I don’t know. The gesture perhaps not so much for Beau himself—the bounding, confused, happy thing—as toward all he represented: possibility, beginning, potential sweetness, vitality. Dear man reaching to the world: how I want to go when I do."

Doty’s book is not a chronological memoir, but rather a map of the philosophy of his devotion to his dogs. There is a sense of mutual rescuing. "A walk is a walk and must be taken [. . .] my routines were thoroughly violated; when it came to taking care of myself, I never felt so completely incapacitated. But somehow it was exactly right that I had someone else to take care of. Here was the golden anchor—steady in terms of need if not behavior. I thought when I brought Beau home I was giving a gift to Wally, but in truth the gift was his to me, or mine to myself, or both. If I’d planned it, I couldn’t have done a better thing to save my life." The dogs are not demi-gods who require a translator, but nor are they lolling nuisances. They are separate from him, yet necessarily so. He loves the dogs like you would (or should) another person: for that complimentary but defined proximity to yourself, leading you into a place that is far better than when you are alone.

And so the connotations of the books are far different, but still the themes weave together much as Doty describes his dogs’ daily walks. Gatsby’s dependency on image and false perfection is merely the cost of wanting to possess that vitality and better life too fast. He fails to capture the love of a woman he desires because he fails to stand at the "requisite distance" for long enough to reflect upon who she really is. He places her on a pedestal, and constructs himself to reflect what he perceives is her perfection. Gatsby is the quintessential bad dog owner. Doty, on the other hand, acknowledges how he reaches out for what the dogs have to offer. He doesn’t force the lessons they can taught him about love and loss. The dogs are not perfect, nor are they human. They are simply family. Dog Years is a moving book; Doty manages, despite his fears, to capture the essence of our complicated reverence for dogs.