THE MAN WHO TALKS TO DOGS

Feral dogs have their day in this overextended exploration of East St. Louis and its #1 Dog Lover.

News flash: packs of wild dogs are roaming America’s inner cities. Journalist Roth discovered this fact while profiling local fixture Randy Grim for the St. Louis Riverfront Times. Driving a beat-up VW bus, maniacally devoted to the unclaimed canines, and possessed of a catalogue of germ phobias that prevents him from eating at buffets or touching escalator handrails, Grim surely seemed a likely subject for a newspaper profile. But Roth has stretched what could have been an engaging feature essay into something that can’t quite hold its own weight. She begins well enough, if melodramatically, taking the reader along with Grim as he prowls abandoned lots on a snowy night. He pounds up staircases and slips on the ice while an uncomprehending animal attempts to escape its hunter, who illustrates all the while the qualities needed (patience, fearlessness) for a job nobody wants. Grim then recalls his first rescue (which landed him with 13 puppies needing to be fed with an eyedropper every two hours for weeks) and the effect of his new obsession on family and friends. With trademark newspaper prose—the sentence fragment, the one-sentence paragraph, the particular affection for “gray” as a descriptor—Roth clatters her way through Grim’s stalking of one particular pack and his efforts to publicize the plight of the abandoned animals. Along the way, she drops in lessons on the likely evolution of domesticated dogs, the prevalence of dog-fighting, the formation of pack mentality, and the thought processes of wild and domesticated dogs.

A worthy concept brought low by abrasive style and slapdash organization.