In winter, in the late 2000s, while holidaying on a “low-lying coral island in the Atlantic Ocean” where the water is “cyan, turquoise, azure blue” and the sand is “the finest pink-flecked white”, Emily LaBarge and her family were assaulted, blindfolded, and held hostage by a group of men armed with machetes and guns for several hours.
The house, when she and her family return to it after reporting the crime to the police, is “the same as before, just ruined”. Dog Days is, among other things, the author’s attempt to confront the trauma of this event, to “push one word against the other” and express the inexpressible. All similarities to conventional memoir end there.
This book has high, philosophical ambitions, and builds an inquiry into narrative itself. LaBarge eschews chronology for a more associative, and more illuminating, story. Dog Days unfolds in a series of digressions on topics as varied as physics, psychoanalysis, religious art and David Lynch, to name a few, and assumes whatever form it requires: dream catalogue, diary, police dossier, art criticism.
She seems to be in search of nothing short of a new form of writing that can, quoting Beckett, “accommodate the mess”. A prolific art critic, LaBarge finds much to contemplate in the works of visual artists; her writing is by turns clear and informed, fractured and phantasmagoric. Her sharp eye for homonym and metaphor, as well as an ability to make unexpected connections across subjects, makes for an expansive, constellatory reading experience.
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Part of what makes Dog Days so interesting is its author’s eagerness to relinquish her own suffering, to cross it like a bridge into the suffering of the world. References to Gaza should come as no surprise, for this is a book about “how life ends and goes on all at once”.
Across these pages, LaBarge tirelessly pursues what she calls “the good story, the short version that doesn’t make anyone feel too uncomfortable, bad, complicit,” a pursuit that brings her to the limits of representation, of language itself. She knows that “trauma is a narrative problem”. She also knows that answers are awfully boring. Dog Days is more than a book of answers, and thank God; it is a book of problems.
