A Few More Days in Dogtown, Please?

Review by Breanne Boland October 6, 2005 Issue

The Last Days of Dogtown is too short. It’s rare praise to dole out to a new release, as it’s not often that I read something I wish would keep going, but the cast of characters in Anita Diamant’s newest novel is so varied and vivid that I would have happily followed them for a few hundred more pages. Its spare length might be what keeps it feeling so alive, like any good time that ends far too early, but I would be willing to sacrifice the life that brevity gives it for more stories from the characters.

Dogtown was an area of the Cape Ann section of Massachusetts, a bulbous piece of land sticking into the ocean north of Boston. This book details the town’s gradual decline as its residents—all some variety of outcast—die or just migrate elsewhere. The town was inhabited by whores and spinsters, ex-slaves and supposed witches, all of whom wouldn’t fit in or couldn’t survive in more conventional society. While they helped each other out when necessary, their wide range of statuses, along with social constraints of the time, prevented them from banding together to create a cohesive town, leading to its gradual demise.

As in The Red Tent, Diamant takes a historical footnote—here she cribs from some limited historical accounts of the people of the area—and embellishes them until they breathe in a way they might never have in life. This time, rather than addressing stories from the Old Testament, she resurrects people from the early 1800s, following them through lives that are disappointing, difficult, and demanding, but also sometimes fulfilling, and always riveting to read about. It’s some trick considering that her source material was “ancient gossip and hearsay.”

She enthralls without resorting to cheap tricks or calculated suspense. Her characters are ordinary people, but their careful and well-crafted characterization is enough to reel us in and keep us through the length of the book. Through what’s really a series of interconnected short stories, all complete on their own but add up to so much more when placed next to each other, Diamant brings Dogtown back to life, if only for a little while. Judy Rhines is a spinster who has more going on in her life than would be guessed even by the friends she’s had for decades. Sprightly Easter Carter craves company at her house/tavern, but her clientele doesn’t quite satisfy. Cornelius Finson, a freed slave, has to deal with being released from servitude, but never really being accepted as part of free society. Ornery, angry Tammy Younger knows the people in better parts of town think she’s a witch, and that’s just fine with her, as it keeps them away from her property. Ruth, another freed slave, tries to live as a man, but instead lives as a quiet outsider. There are more characters, enough to populate an entire town, and they’re all so well drawn they might feel more real than your own neighbors by the time you fly through this book’s 261 pages. Even the dogs in this book are characters, and more vivid than the humans in some other novels.

Too often the names in history seem robbed of all life. Sure, they made extraordinary accomplishments, or they lived through times the likes of which we can barely imagine, but the color is usually leached from these stories. Time rubs away all rough edges and faults, leaving us with a pastel caricature of our ancestors, a portrait of nobility that leaves no room for personality. The Last Days of Dogtown does none of this. The people who populate Dogtown are lovingly portrayed, but their lives aren’t bowdlerized.

The book doesn’t cover any notable period of history. It doesn’t give some new, illuminating view of some great event of the past. It just covers the lives of a few normal people whose names aren’t connected with anything great and grand and well known. That it does that, and does it so well, is ample reason to read it. You’ll embrace it and curse it simultaneously for being so smooth and easy to read, because you’ll be done well before you’re ready.

Scribner, 261 pages. Available at libraries and local book retailers.

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