Seeking Dubai?

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The number of serious literary novels that take for their setting the desert city of Dubai could be numbered on a hand’s digits, with the thumb, ring finger and pinkie unused. When the editors of Time Out Dubai enumerated their “Top 10 Books” about — and set in — Dubai, they came up with, among others, the following: “Carte Blanche,” a James Bond novel by Jeffery Deaver; Ben Mezrich’s “get-rich-quick story” “Rigged”; and Candace Havens’s “Charmed and Dangerous: Bronwyn the Witch No. 1.” Of that last, the venerable travel guide remarks: “This chick-friendly romance by U.S. resident Havens takes an adventurous turn when Bronwyn, a 25-year-old witch from Texas, accepts a job with the British prime minister and finds herself traveling to Dubai, where she meets a sheikh who insists she accept the use of his private jet.” You get the picture.

So much, then, for Dubai as a place that inspires the contemporary novelist in English. The city-state of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum has galvanized contemptuous journalists more than it has writers of fiction. If we know the metropolis through the written word at all, it’s more likely to be by way of “scandal” investigations. Consider, for example, Johann Hari’s 2009 article in The Independent: “The Dark Side of Dubai.” “All over the city,” the breathless Hari wrote just after the financial crash, “there are maxed-out expats sleeping secretly in the sand dunes or the airport or in their cars.” It would seem like good enough material for a novel.

We like a tarnished and discredited Dubai seen from the comfortable distance of a disapproving moral superiority carefully built for us by roving journalists. Yes, we are always told, Dubai is shiny and has the second-most-expensive hotel rooms in the world, but what about the foreign laborers packed like sardines in their slum dorms? Now, however, along comes Joseph O’Neill and “The Dog,” a compact and dense exploration of that same “dark side,” but more disturbingly realized than a journalistic jeremiad simply because its narrator, a lost and tormented New York lawyer working in Dubai for a family of demented Lebanese billionaires named Batros, is too subtly aware of how that moral obscurity lies more in himself and his fellow expatriates than in the iniquities of the sheikhdom.

“The Dog,” O’Neill’s first novel since the much praised “Netherland,” is narrated in a deliberately pedantic and exasperated voice as its hero takes up dubious employment — through old school contacts — with the appalling Sandro Batros, for whom he acts as a shadowy legal frontman while simultaneously mentoring the nabob’s insufferable and disturbed 15-year-old son, Alain. (One of his duties is to record the kid’s weight twice a week; the boy’s reward for dropping enough pounds will be an Alfa Romeo 1750 Spider Veloce.) The novel, indeed, turns on the complexity of this narrative voice, which remains unmoored to an easily identifiable person. Our hero lives in a luxury high-rise, the Situation, that is inhabited, as its website boasts, by the Uncompromising Few. While visiting a luxury resort called the Unique, he has gotten into the habit of using a pseudonym borrowed from a former senior partner in his old New York law firm, Godfrey Pardew, and this is the name that, by extension, he uses in Dubai to conceal and falsify himself. “Good day, Mr. Pardew!” the “Nubian” doormen call out as he enters. It is also the only name by which we know him. But this man is himself a mystery, an American wrapped up in an erudite and deliciously comic game of cat and mouse with a world that will never reward him or even treat him fairly. But will Dubai treat him fairly?

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Joseph O'NeillCreditCourtesy of the author

Of course not. “The Dog” is not, however, just about Dubai. It is simultaneously about New York, about us. Dubai, after all, is not an accident. It’s an attempt by the Gulf Arabs to read the minds of their erstwhile Western patrons and their awkward fantasies — to become familiar with that collective mind, to decipher it and serve up what they think it wants. The Fata Morgana shimmering on the sands is ours.

One cannot deny that the Emiratis have gotten at least a part of this equation right. And so Dubai exists in a frothy dialectic with Western unhappiness, rage and frustration — as well as with a thwarted longing for affordable maids, year-round sun, incredibly cheap gas and Russian girls. Moreover, as our narrator observes: “It’s not anybody’s fault that, until very recently, this has always been an uneventful, materially poor, culturally static corner of the world, with inhabitants who did not prioritize their own future prestige or devote themselves to producing deathless objets for their museological self-representation in posterity. I find this refreshing.”

It is this Arab intuition of Western desire that O’Neill, with nightmarish subtlety, has grasped and consequently made his premise. While his narrator lumbers through a series of meaningless and circular episodes involving not only family entities like the Batros Foundation but also fellow expats (one of the men who shares his diving hobby, Ted Wilson, mysteriously goes missing), he bitterly mulls over the collapse of his relationship with a fellow lawyer named Jenn, back in New York, and the strains and constraints that coupledom in that city often imposes on its baffled participants.

Poor Jenn. He feels sorry for her, apologizes to her in her absence, grinds down his reasons for leaving — but there are no answers. The outwardly perfect romantic arrangement of kindred spirits ends up being its own small nightmare. Confined to a tiny apartment, the lovers shift back and forth between rooms to avoid each other. A peculiar rancor is always in the air.

Similarly, the narrator’s scrupulous legal mind runs through each argument and counterargument and countercounterargument for everything he does. Sleep with a hired Russian girl? There are economic and personal pros and cons for all concerned. Worry about the Dubai labor conditions? “I’ll simply say this: I have run the numbers, and I’m satisfied that I have given the situation of the foreign labor corps, and my relation to it, an appropriate measure of consideration and action.” Is Dubai ugly and vulgar? “The construction process is interesting and sometimes gorgeous. I can’t pretend to understand what I’m looking at, but nor can I deny the spectacular pleasure I get from tall rebars standing in thickets in concrete, or from the short-lived orange plastic mesh which is like orange peel.”

One might wonder whether the narrator’s language, his very consciousness, is more British than American, and a hybrid Brit at that. He is caught, as Alexander Cockburn once put it, describing his own British education, in “the corsets of a Latinate gentility.” But one might also argue that this matters little. “The Dog” is an enactment of the Western mind’s obsessive moral legalism and guilt-parsing, while trying constantly to get the guilt off its shoulders.

The narrator’s mad lingo, meanwhile, is also exquisite and wonderfully overcooked, reading sometimes like a mix of Martin Amis and Thomas Bernhard. Perhaps it’s well beyond the ken of your average New York lawyer. But its inflexible and weirdly earnest decency makes for some excellent comedy as it hurtles against the wall of amoral Dubai reality. There is just enough grim honesty and shrewdness in it to allow O’Neill’s readers to nod our heads at some of his narrator’s more outrageous ruminations. Especially good are the attempts to subject contemporary relationships to fastidious and pointless legal nit-picking. But — a sinister question — does this feel *unrealistic?

Dubai may have its obvious dark side, we come to feel as we swirl downward with the hapless narrator, but there is also our own dark side, more finely and meticulously assembled from the stuff of normal domestic life and a scrupulous yet hypocritical morality projected outward onto the rest of the world. Neither offers what we expect. At the end of the book, the narrator revisits New York and realizes, as if in shock, that he loathes the place. There is, for one thing, the awful “three-quarters-built” Freedom Tower. “I saw the Burj Khalifa at a comparable stage of completion. The Arabian spire had the natural inwit of a blade of grass. Its American counterpart, for all its massiveness, looks like a stump — a gargantuan remnant.” New York is a city in limbo. “To interpret is to misinterpret, never more so than when one is gripped by the prejudicial dismay that’s typical, so I’ve gathered, of the expatriate on his or her return from brand-new Dubai, who must acclimatize to the older, stick-in-the-mud society of origin, and must be careful not to overprize nor to overestimate her new knowledge.”

The narrator goes to Per Se with his Batros contact, Eddie, and is cheerfully fired from his post. Made the fall guy in a legal investigation of the family, he returns to Dubai to face ruin and perhaps imprisonment. But return he does. After all, he says to Eddie, he has to clear his name. “Your name?” Eddie laughs. “What name? Nobody has a name.”

With a consummate elegance, “The Dog” turns in on itself in imitation of the dreadful circling and futility of consciousness itself. Its subplots go nowhere, as in life. But, unlike life, its wit and brio keep us temporarily more alive than we usually allow ourselves to be.

THE DOG
By Joseph O'Neill
241 pp. Pantheon Books. $25.95.