Volume 54, Number 9 · May 31, 2007
Doggy Affections
By Jennifer Schuessler
The New Yorkers
by Cathleen Schine, with drawings by Leanne Shapton
Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 290 pp., $24.00
In two decades and seven novels, Cathleen Schine has made a specialty of creating spirited if mildly depressive heroines in search of a brainy conceit to live by, whether it's birdwatching (To the Birdhouse), French Enlightenment philosophy (Rameau's Niece), Darwinian theory (The Evolution of Jane), or Flaubert's famous dictum about Madame Bovary (She Is Me). But in Schine's latest zingy domestic comedy, The New Yorkers, the characters don't have conceits. They have dogs. Or they don't—and the novel's own conceit is that this makes all the difference. On the slightly down-at-heels Upper West Side block where the story unfolds, happiness—or the closest Schine's brightly downbeat characters can come to it—is next to dogginess.
Review, 1438 words
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