Jon Frankel’s Isle of Dogs, Part I, is a book written on a large canvas, War and Peace style. Frankel is a deft writer who, like Tolstoy, is able to handle both the vast sweep of history, and the details that make a novel feel real and living. He keeps this dichotomy throughout, and it is an intimate and revealing view of a richly imagined world. The reader does not get lost in either the big or little picture. Things keep moving along.
I am especially struck by the sense of a lost Eden, the sister having her brother, but also her father, as a lover. Like any Edenic motif, this harkens to an age before sexual rules; a pre-fall view in a world that has already toppled. This novel is cursed by a sense of loss and longing.
Toward the end, I was especially struck by the depictions of downtown Manhattan with both its street battles and everyday scenes of life. Although this is a New York City set far in the future, Frankel still gives us a deeply and undeniably NYC novel. But he also bows reverently to the genre, providing a strange otherness to the great metropolis.
We are all fortunate this this is only Part 1 of Frankel’s epic. More gifts await us.
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