Apologizing To Dogs (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

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

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Scribner; 1st Edition: 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 edition (September 8, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684859467
• ISBN-13: 978-0684859460
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #930,081 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars New wonders from Joe Coomer, September 7, 1999

By	John L. Pearson "jlarsp" (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Joe Coomer is, quite simply, one of our best writers. His earlier novel The Loop (out of print, grab a copy if you can find it) is one of the most delightful and moving novels of the decade. Apologizing to Dogs shows again that he can make eccentric characters more alive and real than most of the real people you'll ever meet. Writing novels myself, I usually think when reading, I could do that. But when reading Coomer, I just watch the language flow and and let the mystery and joy overtake me, wondering how he does it. His earlier novels have all been with small publishing houses that were not able to give him the push he deserves. This new one is put out by Scribner, which hopefully will give him the exposure he needs to reach the audience which is surely there. Read this book. You'll consider it the discovery of the year.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars DAY TO DAY HAPPENINGS ON WORTH ROW, April 8, 2000

By	Nancy Martin (Pennsylvania (orig. NY)) - See all my reviews

Although the characters were quirky and a bit eccentric, I just couldn't get into the day to day activities of the 12 homes/storefronts that remain on Worth Row. Effie, the 71 year old snoop, keeps a diary of everyone's comings and goings. There are more secrets going on here than on any soap opera on the air today. The fact that this title had the word "dog" in it is what drew me to it. Too bad there wasn't more of the dog and less of the other characters.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars No Apologies Necessary, December 3, 2003

By	Jack Purcell (Placitas, NM USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Apologizing to Dogs (Paperback)

This convoluted plot would have been less surprising if it had shown itself centuries ago in three acts as a performance before Shakespearean audiences. The book isn't masterly and the plot probably isn't as tightly woven as it might be. But the characters are believable, the setting, almost bizarre enough to have come out of Wentworth, Ohio, by a popular horror writer, minus all the occult and parapsychology.

An ingrown neighborhood in Fort Worth, Texas, full of personal histories and human flaws reaches a series of climaxes (no pun intended) during a period of a few hours and in the end the reader is left with a handful of seeds for his own imagination to sprout and blossom. Readers familiar with Guy Clark might hear the lyrics of `Boats to Build' repeating themselves through some of the episodes. The coincidence of similarity might suggest Coomer is a Guy Clark aficionado, or that Guy found the story an inspiration for his song. Either way, the two make a matched set.

Coomer owes no apologies to dogs or readers for this one.