Confessions of a Guilty Freelancer

Pinckney Benedict: Dogs of God

Firstnovels,traditionally,aresensitivereads–morethanvaguelyautobiographical , saddled with protagonists who bear a shouting distance resemblance to the authors. This first novel, by the young, gifted shortstory -writer, Pinckney Benedict, recipient of the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award, among other prizes, could be one of the first of a trend initiated by a new generation of twenty-something male writers (Benedict was born in 1964). The new trend is to skip over the sensitive stage and go straight for the commercial jugular: let the blood flow, the flesh rend, the gunpowder burn–Generation X becomes Generation XXX. Like last year’s A Simple Plan, by another novelist in his twenties, Scott Smith, Dogs of War is an adventure tale written by a talented youngwriterwithafeelforsinewyprosethatissodrenchedinviolence thatitspantingeagernessforalargeaudienceisasintenseasthegleeful sadism of its characters. And Benedict doesn’t hold back on characters: the misfit posse is rounded up, all grotesque isolati, ready to mingle, headed inevitably for the showdown where everyone comes together with a bang. When something weird makes its appearance–a pack of wild dogs, for instance, headed by a crazed malamute–you can rest assured it will Pinckney Benedict: Dogs of God 282 283 figure in the novel’s climax. But Benedict is very impatient to get to a climax; Dogs of God is practically all climax, as if “cut to the chase,” rather than say, “make it new,” or “be interesting,” is the new generation ’s most prized literary axiom. Benedict makes use of flamboyant violence in his two well-received collections of short stories (Town Smoke and The Wrecking Yard), but violence in the short story form can be made to implode, ratherthanexplode,besurgicalratherthanwholesale.Atnovellength, the excess begins to smell as much of crass exploitation as it does of cordite and burning flesh. Benedict has degrees from Princeton and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and displays a sure hand in conjuring both a sensoryworldandcolorfulcharacters .Goody,thedesignatedprotagonist, an amateur fighter with no known history, except a history of “sixteen and oh” bouts, is our moral compass, busted up as he is. The novel’s prologuegivesushisdescriptionofhowhekilledamaninanirregular, but arranged, fight in a machine shop. Goody is the novel’s good guy (given the crew to chose among), but only as good as the diminutive “Goody” implies. At the beginning, Goody mysteriously arrives in a rented house at the edge of a truly godforsaken cane field, the house being the site of a wife-killing by the previous tenant, intricately recounted, and Goody quickly discovers a dead body, vividly described, in the cane field. Goody stumbles on to drug capitalism at its ugliest, and the chase is on. Nothing in the landscape is not malignant; it’s a world where Hawthorne and Poe meet Harry Crews, and the suspicion that Dogs of God may be an MTV version of an old-fashioned ghost story is hard to set aside. But Goody is there to give Benedict license to describe a lot of connoisseur violence. He has a flair for description and sense of place. 284 In competition with the popular culture, what writing can do, that the camera cannot, is be articulate. The dead fighter, as regarded by Goody: “His left eye is closed, but the right is open wide; a frozen wink. He looks surprised to be where he is. The pupil covers most of the hazel iris of the open eye, and I am near enough to see that it is ragged at its edge, not smooth like you would expect. It is the dilated pupil that gives him his startled look. He has a slight smile on his lips. Blue shadow fills a deep rectangular dent in the exact middle of his forehead.” The publisher compares Dogs of War to James Dickey’s Deliverance , but Benedict’s novel doesn’t mix the ordinary with the extraordinary . Everything and everyone in Dogs of War is extraordinary: Goody; his landlord Inchcape; Dreama (as in dream on, I suppose), the novel’s one female character who is given more than a paragraph or two (this is what used to be described as men’s fiction); Tannhauser , his name conjuring either Nazis or a Christmas carol, a self-styled backwoods drug lord with twelve fingers; two “transnationals,” Bodo and Toma, who are the sinister foreign arm dealers and drug entrepreneurs come to do business with Tannhauser; two “Mingos,” who are the murderous black employed protectors of Tannhauser; Yukon, his second in command, who loses...