A Small Dog Barking: & Other Stories [Paperback]

In his masterful study of the short story, The Lonely Voice, Frank O’Connor stated that the short story has never had a hero; instead it has “a submerged population group.” He uses this term to connote “outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society,” persons suffering material or spiritual deprivation. As a result, he declares, “There is in the short story, at its most characteristic [ . . . ] an intense awareness of human loneliness.” The Lonely Voice was published more than forty years ago, but O’Connor’s words perfectly capture the central preoccupations of a recent story collection: A Small Dog Barking by Canadian Robert Strandquist.
In A Small Dog Barking, Robert Strandquist mines similar territory. His stories also plumb the depths of human loneliness with a series of deeply alienated men. But where Rothbart’s characters seek connection, Strandquist’s bitterly resent the desires that draw them into the familial and romantic fray. The two collections are also stylistically distinct. Strandquist’s stories are much more tightly crafted and more formally innovative.
A Small Dog Barking is Strandquist’s third book of fiction. He displays a dizzying versatility with this collection, moving from a realist story of a man fleeing the suburbs to escape the cloying smell of dryer sheets, to a sojourn inside the head of a half-mad wrongfully imprisoned man, to an update of Hamlet told from the perspective of Horatio in which the hero (here “Hamnet”) studies architecture and drives a convertible, to a violent, near-future, dystopian adventure. Strandquist flirts with speculative fiction and surrealism. He employs dramatic shifts in point of view, not just from story to story, but also within single stories.
The collection is permeated by a vague sense of menace; even the more realistic of the ten fictions here yield disturbing surprises. At times, I wasn’t able to understand fully what was happening in these stories. But then Strandquist deliberately keeps the reader off balance, so perhaps I wasn’t always supposed to grasp everything.
Strandquist’s prose is spare and precise, studded with startling, evocative images. Here are a few that I particularly relished, the first from “Dryer Sheets”, the other two from “Tents”:

“What was left of the afternoon’s sun traced the edge of her lace curtain like a welding torch.”

“Into Luxembourg I came, dragging a lonely life behind me like a parachute prematurely deployed.”

“The last of the sun’s daggers went in and died beautifully. Reduced to subtext, the moon shivered over an alien room.”

Strandquist has a wild imagination and an awe-inspiring mastery of language and form, which combine here to offer up a bracingly skewed vision of humanity. A Small Dog Barking is an excellent collection, well worth reading and rereading.
Kate Sutherland (Books in Canada)

Following the success of his novel, The Dreamlife of Bridges, Robert Strandquist makes a much-awaited return to the short story form. As always, Strandquist’s works explores relationships both familial and sexual, and plumbs the unspoken communications where things go haywire. This collection is more eclectic than his first collection, The Inanimate World, covering themes of nature, of building and destruction. Settings are extreme or post-apocalyptic and walk the line of magic realism. Despite the sometimes-alien landscapes his characters inhabit, there is always the motif of adults navigating the riparian paths of longing, love and loss.