An artist gets his posthumous due in Mengay’s literary novel, the third in a series.

Jake, the alienated hero of the first two volumes in the author’s Eldorado trilogy, is dead…in the present, at least, where his paintings have found posthumous popularity in the art world. His mixed-race, trans nephew Will has taken up the story of Jake and his twin sister Wren (Will’s mom) from the vantage of the quiet Western town of Eldorado, where Jake lived out his final years. As a kid, Will was never much interested in Jake, whom he thought of as “untoasted Wonder Bread.” It’s only at college that Will realizes Jake is a major and incendiary queer artist, described by one tabloid as “The Diabolic Dabbler, Painter of Perversions, and Prince of Peccadillos.” Though Will is Jake’s lone surviving blood relative, he is not the heir to or executor of the dead man’s estate: that role goes to Serge, the friend whom Jake’s husband Tommy (also deceased) referred to as “the other husband.” Will does have access to Jake’s papers, though—an archive of documents that tell the story of Jake and Wren and others in their sprawling web of relatives, friends, and lovers, much of which is relevant to Will’s understanding of his own history. As Will’s investigation unfolds, the narration becomes untethered to his time and point of view, drifting through other characters’ experiences at various points across the decades and bringing Jake and Wren back to temporary life. Mengay’s prose is dense and philosophical: “It’s a mind game, to come upon an archive,” observes Will with typical lyricism. “Like looting a grave. An archive’s a crypt, and cryptic; bursting surprises, things you didn’t expect or want to come upon; things you don’t want to know.” Elegiac and sweeping, the novel examinesthe ways that history can traumatize you into making art, and how art can heal even after the artist has gone.

A polyphonic swan song for a trilogy about identity and family.

In Mengay’s novel, love is won and love is lost in this account of a gay man coming of age in the 1970s, told from the perspective of his dog.

Molly, the narrator, is dead: “As a final straw they buried me in this traffic circle under the cover of night,” she gripes in an arresting opening line. Molly is also a dog, and it’s through her eyes, as she reflects on her history, that the reader also witnesses the life of her young owner, Jake. Jake and his twin sister, Wren, acquire Molly as children at the height of the Cold War. Molly observes Jake and Wren, noting how they grow and change. Notably, she watches them fall in love, and sees their romances flatly rejected by their family: in the Midwest of the 1970s, interracial and queer relationships are taboo. It doesn’t help that Jake’s two major romances are messy: Romeo is forceful and demanding; while Peacoat, the boy he dates after his relationship with Romeo ends, is notably gentler and softer, he is tied to a non-traditional, fervently religious sect. In the words of another character, Peacoat’s group “[s]ounds ‘spicious to me.” Mengay’s prose is extremely dense—his writing is colloquial and evocative of a specific time and place, but it’s also markedly literary in style and content. When Jake and Romeo have sex, the author draws attention to their shadows, “their darker selves,” before describing their physical actions. Throughout the text, Mengay makes clear homages to other works of literature, and his writing recalls that of T. S. Eliot, Kafka, and Thomas Wolfe. The reader may question how a dog is able to catch all of these details, but the voice never feels gimmicky. Instead, it provides both otherworldly omniscience and tender intimacy to the narration. A triumph.

A close look at falling in and out of love through the eyes of a dog—a smart dog, who has clearly read the modernists.