Dogs of Babel: A Novel - ISBNLookup.com

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The Barnes & Noble Review
When Paul Iverson's wife, Lexy, is found dead in their yard, the only witness to her death is the couple's loyal dog, Lorelei. Struck numb with grief and consumed by the need to know why his beloved Lexy died, Paul leaves his job as a linguistics professor to take on the impossible task of teaching his dog to communicate. With Lorelei by his side, he flashes back to the pivotal moments of his life with Lexy: their first, weeklong date, his muddied attempts to convince her to have a child, and their last bitter fight before her death. His journey will lead him to unbearable secrets of Lexy's burdened heart and teach him that the truest forms of love don't need words at all. In richly imagined prose, Carolyn Parkhurst's debut novel is a surprising, heartwarming, and utterly captivating story of love and coming to terms with loss. Andrew Ayala

People

Parkhurst does magnificently...illuminates the emotional landscape that faces a surviving spouse...unforgettable.

Entertainment Weekly

...shimmers with idiosyncratic intrigue...Parkhurst tells her tale with considerable skill...a humanistic parable of the heart's confusions..

Esquire

a heartbreaking exploration of memory and language, grief and redemption.

Marie Claire

a quirky and endearing love triangle..

Time

a neatly, almost perfectly constructed novel...

The New Yorker

The premise is simple, if strange. Paul, a linguistics professor, comes home from work to discover that his wife has fallen fatally from their back-yard apple tree. The only witness to the event is the family dog, Lorelei. Desperate to find out whether his wife's death was suicide or accident, Paul does what any linguistics professor would do: he sets about teaching the dog to talk so that she can tell him what happened. In between accounts of talking-dog experiments, we get flashbacks to Paul's blissful married life. His wife, a mask-maker who played whimsical trickster to his straitlaced academic, occasionally dabbled in the occult, and this gives Parkhurst the opportunity to write about tarot readings, spooky masks, and dream journals. But the mysticism, though ably rendered, gets tedious, while Parkhurst rushes through the experiments with the dog -- the peg from which the book hangs -- developing neither verisimilitude nor artful absurdity.

The New York Times

This is a book that wears its symbolism on its sleeve, at great risk but with startling effectiveness. In fact, Lexy is a square egg herself, dangerously unable to fit the predictable wifely mold. And her scalp is tattooed with snakes, a sign of her troubled adolescence and her inner Medusa. What's more, Ms. Parkhurst dares to court heavy-handedness by making Lexy an artist who creates masks. Lexy wears the face of Lorelei at one point; she wears Paul's at another. — Janet Maslin

The Los Angeles Times

The Dogs of Babel is a cuddly tall tale about the rituals of grief. Yet it poses some uncomfortable questions: Are spouses as unknowable as pets? Can we help but go to absurd lengths to avoid confronting the reality of death? Can radical surgery improve a dog's likelihood of talking? In the end, Lorelei does tell Paul everything he needs to know. But, like this strange and winning novel, he uncovers truth in a wholly unexpected way. — Mark Rozzo

The Washington Post

In the brief union of Lexy and Paul, author Carolyn Parkhurst has created two compelling characters to take us through the shoals and delights of falling in love and into the calmer and sometimes more dangerous world of marriage. By interweaving Paul's project on canine linguistics with his memories of Lexy, Parkhurst shows how the way things end can change the way we see the past. — Susan Dooley

Publishers Weekly

Consumed with grief and obsessed with unlocking the mystery of wife Lexy's fatal fall from a backyard apple tree, 43-year-old linguistics professor Paul Iverson describes himself as "a man who wants to know things no human being could tell him." Unsure whether Lexy's death was an accident or suicide and confronted with some puzzling "clues" she left behind, Paul soon undertakes the bizarre and seemingly impossible task of teaching the tragedy's only witness, his beloved Rhodesian Ridgeback dog, to speak. Seamlessly shifting between characters and accents (including a memorable performance as a Southern fortune teller), stage, television and voice-over actor Singer gives an impeccable, unabridged narration. He deftly handles Parkhurst's frequent use of flashbacks to the couple's early courtship and marriages and has a keen ability to vocally reflect the slightest change in mood. While some listeners may find the animal language acquisition subplot farfetched at points, Parkhurst's attention to human emotion and response bring a poignancy to the unique story line that translates well to audio. Simultaneous release with the Little, Brown hardcover (Forecasts, Mar. 3) (June) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

KLIATT

When the narrator's wife, Lexy, dies in a fall from a backyard apple tree, the only witness is their dog, Lorelei. In his grief, Paul, who is a trained linguist, decides that the dog knows something about the death and tries to teach him to communicate. Even he realizes how ludicrous this is, but he can't seem to move on to the next phase of his life until he solves the mystery of her death. Gradually he gathers clues that Lexy left him and comes to understand what really happened. The book is about communication and how difficult it is to connect with another person and yet how desperately we need to. Some of the symbolism in the story is obvious; for instance, Lexy is a mask-maker and a truth hider. Paul is a linguist who can't understand his wife's needs until she is dead. Parkhurst is able to take an almost silly premise, a grieving man tries to teach his dog to talk, and turn it into a story of understanding and eventual communication and the passage from life's darkest moments to the gradual lifting of darkness. It is quietly wonderful and filled with insight. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2003, Little, Brown, Back Bay, 264p., Ages 15 to adult.
—Nola Theiss

Library Journal

When Paul Iverson discovers that his wife has died in a fall from a tree, he does something unusual. Suspecting that her death was not an accident-there are odd clues, like the reshuffled books on the shelf-he uses his training as a linguist to try to teach their dog, Lorelei, to talk so that he can reconstruct Lexy's last hours. As Paul slips into ever more desperate behavior, we hear an account of his and Lexy's courtship and marriage-the tender, tentative union of two damaged people. But then Paul contacts a man convicted of operating on dogs to install vocal chords, and what had been a poignant, affecting tale turns truly frightening (dog lovers, beware). And then it is over; Paul learns that there are some things you should never do, even for love, and turns the memory of Lexy into a gift. Parkhurst delivers a remarkable debut in quiet, authoritative prose. It's especially noteworthy that Paul's crusade does not seem preposterous and that while the author offers an affecting message, her characters don't seem like message bearers but distinctive, lively individuals you might like to know. Highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/03.]-Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal" Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Booklist

The brilliance ... lies in the subtle buildup of emotion ... and ... how powerfully that emotional wave hits..... An unforgettable debut.

Kirkus Reviews

A workmanlike, confusedly titled debut about the death of a morbid young wife. Paul Iverson, a regular-guy linguistics prof at a mid-Atlantic university, receives the news that his wife of several years, Lexy, has fallen to her death from a backyard apple tree. Only her beloved dog Lorelei, a Rhodesian Ridgeback, has witnessed the fall and the last hours of her life, and Paul, grieving and numb, embarks on the professionally estranging work of trying to get Lorelei to tell (literally) what she knows. Oddities emerge--like the fact that Lexy cooked and fed the dog a steak and rearranged the bookshelves before she climbed and fell--suggesting that Lexy, a maker of festive masks from clay, paper, and varnish, had an ulterior motive in climbing the tree. In his disembodied depression, Paul researches possibilities of language acquisition in dogs and even contacts an imprisoned canine mutilator convicted of conducting surgery on dogs to reshape their palates for talking. When Paul attends a meeting of the Cerberus Society, the story turns really bizarre, but only briefly: Parkhurst adheres to the gradual, fairly tedious unraveling of Paul and Lexy’s courtship and married life. The lack of detail about Lexy’s past is covered by her charmingly erratic behavior as a newlywed--the playful thespian masks she fashions for weddings and plays transforming into death masks. But there’s an underlying fissure in this conflicted first novel, the misdirected title a clue: it’s a simple love story without the gumption to go in more unsettling directions à la Patrick McGrath. The highlight isn’t the couple’s first date at Disney World, but the kitschy TV medium Lady Arabelle’s tarot card reading of Lexy’slast night alive. Paul is an emotionally bumbling Everyman no one can dislike, simply desiring a stable home and family, while his wife’s coreless irresolution seems without substance and ultimately merely irritating. A compelling idea fizzles out into anticlimactic detail.