THE OLDEST BITCH ALIVE

In a glass house in the Appalachian Mountains, an aging French bulldog infected with parasitic worms whirls through an existential crisis.

Gelsomina lives the same day ad infinitum amid chic furniture; a younger bulldog named Zampanò; and her owners, Wendy and John, an interior designer and architect who are, in short, the type of couple who would name their designer dogs after characters in a Fellini film. When she accidentally laps up an egg sac, worms begrudgingly make a home in her squat, senior body. The discomfort and strange intimacy Gelsomina feels at sharing her body with this pair drives her to fantasize about the world outside glass walls and electric fencing. She is led to revolt against her lot in life through grandiose thoughts—“Oh! My form, my form. It bends to the swollen and dirty milk of morning ether”— and humble actions, like gazing out the window and urinating inside, as she clings to life in spite of one of the worms’ possessed reproduction and her own rapid decline. The novel shifts among perspectives (dog, worm, and human alike) to poke at dependence and autonomy, boundaries real and perceived, cohabitation, and consciousness. Day strikes a careful balance in her depiction of animals; she grants lowly or ridiculous creatures lofty inner dialogues marked by rationality and morality while laying base nature bare in skillful, frequently nauseating prose. The transparent house, in which Gelsomina feels like a parasite herself, is a fascinating addition to the nonhuman forces which shape this story. This is an ambitious, freewheeling novel that plays with a great deal of philosophical material, but the painstaking specificity in which Day packages these musings, along with the visceral suffering and ecstasy of the book’s tragic heroine, protect it from opacity.

An uncommonly commanding debut.