DAWG TOWNE

Suburbanites can’t help getting entangled in one another’s troubles in Kaltman’s pet-centric novel.

Towne is a quiet suburb on the East Coast and the sort of place where nothing ever really seems to happen. “Towne is super cute and quaint,” as one character puts it. “Like, in a time warp. Everyone wants to know everyone else’s business, but they get the dirt and go back to their safe little houses like turtles into shells.” Nell Delano is a former math prodigy who, in her 20s, has become eccentric, riding her bike around town at night and occasionally stealing other peoples’ pets. Uninspired novelist Abe Kaufman has just moved to town with his wife, baby, and pit bull, hoping that stay-at-home fatherhood will provide some good material for his fiction. Car mechanic and “wobbly-geezer” Paddy has just lost his wife and must now learn to live again as a single man. There’s also David Leibowitz, who’s about to have a bar mitzvah but suspects that he might actually be a girl; David’s recently divorced mother, Lucinda, who’s looking to build her interior decorating business; and aging, self-centered actor Brady Cole, who’s just moved into the town’s historic mansion as part of a quest to turn his life around. Nearly everyone has a dog and a secret, and their lives connect in ways that readers will find difficult to predict. Kaltman’s prose style is chatty and observant, and she shows herself to be attuned to the emotions of both her human and canine players, as when Paddy tries to get his dog to move on after the death of Paddy’s spouse: “ ‘She’s not coming back,’ Paddy told the dog over and over again, but it did no good. Barney would stare at Paddy blankly, bark once, then curl in on himself and pretend to be asleep.” The plot moves along quickly, cycling through short sections that focus on individual characters. It isn’t long before the reader is caught up in the trysts and trials of these flawed suburban dwellers.

A fun and often funny tale of intersecting lives.