Amazon.com Review
About the last thing you'd expect to find on a street arrayed with a dozen antique shops is something novel. Yet Worth Row, the setting for Joe Coomer's eighth book,
Apologizing to Dogs, is fairly brimming with surprise and revelation. Romance, thievery, blackmail, and more all come to light on one bewildering day in Fort Worth's historic antique district. By the time the dust has settled, Coomer's quirky cadre of shop owners find their fragile equanimity forever shattered.
Slowly and surely losing patrons to the nearby mall, the Row is presided over by the prim and sentimental clothes dealer Nadine, who is the object of carpenter Carl's desire. His other passion, it turns out, is gutting his house to build the ship that he hopes will ferry Nadine and him to a new life. Meanwhile, Carl's neighbor, the recalcitrant Howard Dog-in-His-Path, conceals a bevy of confidences while loafing in his front-yard tub; the reclusive, paranoid Effie peers through her shutters and transcribes up-to-the-minute neighborhood reports in her journal; and, across the street, Tradio and Arthur are caught between the need to reveal they're lovers and the desire to keep the Row's boat from rocking. Just up the street are Mr. and Mrs. Haygood, and next to them are Mazelle--of Mazelle's Rare and Medium Rare Books--and her husband. These two couples form a love-square that gets dug up, literally, by a curious dog.
Just about every bit of tangled lineage and concealed secret gets exposed in Coomer's outlandish tale. At its best, Apologizing to Dogs reveals the tension between nostalgia and fulfillment, as well as the overwhelming force of our attachments, material or otherwise. "Why do we save old things," Arthur asks Nadine. "Why do we collect these old precious things?" In its improbable eruptions and rambling dialogue, however, the novel occasionally sacrifices verisimilitude for reheated comedy. The paradox of selling the old in order to sustain the present keeps the novel churning along. Soak up the bittersweet laughs, but, as one character says, tellingly, "Don't try to guess the end. Try not to figure it out." --Ben Guterson
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
On a dead-end street of failing antique shops in Fort Worth, 35 years of secrets are about to explode into the open in this boisterous and buoyant novel from Coomer (The Loop, Beachcombing for a Shipwrecked God, etc.). The plot features an ensemble cast of oddball neighbors: rotund Aura, so fat that neither she nor her Jack Sprat husband realize she's nine months pregnant; Carl, who's secretly dismantling his house from the inside in order to build a boat and prove his love for Nadine, the aging belle of the block; and winsome, paranoid Effie, who records everything in her diary, and comprehends nothing. There are 17 neighbors in all (including Himself, the delightful stray dog who sets things in motion), and Coomer balances their stories with all the skill and exuberance of a master juggler building to his fiery climax. The action unfolds on an October day in 1986, with a violent thunderstorm approaching. Before the day is out, shabby Worth Row will see a fire and a flood, a birth and at least one death, and the painful stripping away of secret after secret. "We are doomed to mystery and knowledge," Coomer writes. "We will forever not know then know. We are doomed to understanding." In this antique-filled milieu, the theme assumes a particular resonance, linked as it is to a broader tension between past and future. What Coomer gives up in depth he more than makes up for in breadth and comic verve. Refreshingly, the novel doesn't pretend to have all the answers. In a fast-paced and deeply plotted narrative where dogs hold all the secrets, Coomer neatly avoids dogma. 4-city author tour. (Oct.) FYI: The rights to Beachcombing for a Shipwrecked God have been optioned by Jodie Foster; Bill Murray optioned the rights to A Flatland Fable. The Loop will be published simultaneously in paper.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
