Marley & Me: Life and Love With the World’s Worst Dog

Review by Rawlings McKinney December 15, 2005 Issue

Life was good for John and Jenny Grogan. They had been married for fifteen months. They were young and in love. They were starting to think about what they called The Baby Thing. But, as John says in the first chapter of Marley and Me, they could not let well enough alone.

One morning John saw Jenny looking at the classified section of the Palm Beach Post. She was circling ads in the “Pets-Dogs” heading. “It’s the plant,” Jenny replied when John asked if there was something he should know.

Earlier Grogan had surprised her with a large dieffenbachia. No special occasion, it was just his way of saying married life was great. She watered it too much and it soon died. Somehow Jenny made “the cosmic leap of logic from dead flora in a pot to living fauna in the pet classified. Kill a plant, buy a puppy.”

To her it made perfect sense. She had her husband had never really nurtured anything before. They both had childhood pets but they had always depended on their parents to keep them alive and well. They were now at that point in their married life when a decision on the Baby Thing would have to be made. Grogan saw that this was the real issue. Jenny, on the verge of tears, said, “If I can’t even keep a plant alive, how am I ever going to keep a baby alive?” In her mind, a dog would be good practice.

They steered clear of puppy mills and found a backyard breeder of Labrador retrievers. Here they thought they would find a puppy raised in a loving atmosphere and would have a chance to see both the parents. John fully expected to find a pup as good as Shaun, the dog he got when he was ten. His memory was of a dog so perfect he was dubbed Saint Shaun. He was well behaved, spirited but controlled, affectionate but calm.

They saw the mother first. Just what a lab should be: sweet natured, calm and beautiful. When they asked to see the father, the breeder said he was around somewhere but didn’t they want to see the puppies? This should have been a warning. After picking out their puppy they headed to the car. Suddenly they heard a crashing and heavy breathing in the woods, not unlike what you would hear in a slasher movie. A yellow blur materialized. It was a huge Lab, wet and covered with mud and burrs, tongue hanging to one side and frothing at the mouth. As the animal sped past them a split-second glance revealed a slightly crazed but somehow joyous gaze in its eyes. “I think we just met Dad,” John said to Jenny.

Thus begins the Grogans’ life with the world’s worst dog. But is Marley really a bad dog? There is plenty of supporting evidence for this conclusion. Grogan hilariously presents it in this well-written and entertaining book. But as Marley’s misdeeds are chronicled, you experience a gradual awareness that this is not a bad dog as much as he is a special dog. He is a happy, exuberant creature who doesn’t have a mean bone in his body. He’s expelled from obedience school not as a delinquent but as a party dog who’d rather sniff poodle crotches than heel. His affable goofiness is the root of most of his destructive behavior. He wags his body, not just his tail. Anything fragile in his path is doomed. Screen doors are minor obstacles easily overcome in the joyous pursuit of wild creatures in the yard. The wrought iron table he drags across the outdoor dining area of a trendy Boca Raton restaurant is just a trifling impediment to his quest to introduce himself to a poodle at a table fifty feet across the terrace.

A bad dog could never have shown such empathy with Jenny during the Grogans’ first family crisis. And when a stabbing occurs in the neighborhood, Marley immediately sheds his goofiness and is a vigilant guardian for John as he comforts the seriously wounded victim. As the family grows, Marley shows no jealousy toward the children; indeed, he welcomes them as new playmates.

Grogan brings Marley to life for the reader. We smell this creature, feel his slobbering tongue on our face and see his happy face. His what-me-worry and lets-take-life-as-it-comes attitude is infectious. After the end of Marley’s long and good and goofy life, Grogan realizes that although he was nominally the master, it was Marley who had imparted the important life lessons.

A “chewer of couches, a slasher of screens, a slinger of drool, a tipper of trashcans,” Marley nonetheless taught his master to appreciate simple things. As the dog grew older and suffered through aches and pains, he showed how to be optimistic in the face of adversity. Most of all, he taught him about friendship, unselfishness and unwavering loyalty. He then realized an amazing concept: Marley as mentor, a teacher and role model. It was indeed possible for a dog, even one as nutty and uncontrollable as Marley, “to point humans to the things that really mattered in life.”

He will get no arguments from those of us who own (or are owned by) dogs.

William Morrow, An Imprint of Harper/Collins Publishers, 291 pages, available at local booksellers and libraries.

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