Sometimes he teaches the guy's spoiled 15-year-old son how to do Sudoku. Sometimes he has to book Bryan Adam's for one of the guy's wife's birthday. Our narrator actually spends most of his days sending emails (both real, and hilariously, in his mind) to his employers, trying to cover his own ass in case what the rich sons who run the conglomeration of companies are up to isn't exactly legal. Dubai is a fascinating place, and O'Neill, through his narrator, delights in pointing out all its foibles and its hypocrisy - often at length. For instance, Dubai is a place of ridiculous wealth and excess (even as it's still reeling from the effects of the financial crash), but it's still ruled by strict religious law. The story itself, which takes place in 2011, is largely portrait of Dubai - and its massive contradictions. In this novel, he's closer to an Irish David Foster Wallace.) (I remember thinking after reading that novel that O'Neill reminded me of an Irish Philip Roth. I loved it, much as I did O'Neill's previous novel Netherland. It's a style you're going to either love or hate. But the real story on this novel is its dense, ultra-logical (dude's a lawyer, after all), digression (and parenthesis)-laden prose. Joseph O'Neill's new novel, The Dog, is a strange little piece of fiction - it's about an unnamed mid-30s lawyer who, having just participated in a spectacularly messy break-up with his girlfriend of nine years, moves to Dubai to take a job with a family conglomerate that may or may not be totally on the level.
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