On Page 42: A Three Dog Life

[A Three Dog Life by Abigail Thomas, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2006, p. 42]

The purpose of this blog is to take a look at one page or one moment in a text and interrogate it. This time we are looking at Abigail Thomas’s A Three Dog Life.

The first thing I noticed when reading A Three Dog Life is syntax and scenery. This page 42 offers us an easily pleasurable read, which shows off Thomas’s narrative style.

Where some narratives focus on character or action, she focuses on the scene. For nonfiction, I think its easy to either be distant with information or be intimate with mindfulness. Thomas’s story is deeply personal; however, she chooses to zoom in on the scenery of her life:

I spotted something peculiar in the thickety growth of a young tree.

She enhances that scenery with adjectives: “peculiar,” “thickety,” and “young.” The narrative is syntactically enhanced at every turn. Once in rhythm the scene continues to flow and we get:

I glanced around, perhaps the anonymous artist was waiting for his anonymous audience…   

She deploys a subtle alliteration which continues to heighten the scene. This rhetorical playfulness holds the reader in and allows them a chance to simply go along. It’s one of the things that makes Abigail Thomas’s narrative so enjoyable to read.

The scene follows Thomas and two of her dogs in the park. As boring as that my one sentence summary may sound, she is able to keep us reading without odd distant facts or deep internal ponderings. Her narrative is built mostly from syntactical playfulness and the presence of scenery.

Note: This brief and late episode can in the middle of an illness. While recovering, we lost our internet service and the situation is still ongoing. I will continue to try to get post out on the 24th of the month.