With help from a pet, a solitary woman strays into her past
Dog, By Michelle Herman, MacAdam/Cage, 191 pp., $15
Poet Jill Rosen, 44 and single, teaches English at a Midwestern college. Wait. Make that J. T. Rosen. ''Jill" is an infelicity for which she's never quite forgiven her mother. One day Rosen finds herself, to her surprise, with a puppy. Late the night before, tipsy and Googling ''adoption," ''foster," and ''home," she discovers sites about adopting dogs instead of children. The next day she's at the home of a man who takes in strays. Soon she's on her way home with a brindled pup she thoughtlessly names Philip. After the dog has learned to answer to Phil, she irritatedly realizes people will think, ''Jill and Phil, how cute." J. T. Rosen is a proud woman. Nothing about her is cute.
Design and control are the keynotes of her life. Her bookshelves were custom-built for individual rooms of her house. When any of her students attempts to shift a conversation from the academic to the personal, she promptly squelches it. Her life has not been complicated by a lover for years.
Now she has a dog. A dog she's named Phil -- the name, she remembers with annoyance, of a long-ago lover: ''She prided herself on the close contact she maintained with her unconscious."
But Rosen does not maintain close contact with anyone or anything. She has no friends in her department. She won't let her students get close to her. She certainly doesn't keep in touch with her muse: Almost nine years after her second book, she's making no progress on her third.
And as she recalls her relationship with Philip the human, and all the other people she's loved and pushed away, Phil the dog drags her back into the present.
Rosen's voice alone makes Michelle Herman's ''Dog" worth reading. She's delightfully pedantic, capable of mentally reproaching her mother for the sound and meter of a sibling's name: ''Norman Stephen Rosen: as if she had tried to think of three names that would sound ungainly together."
But Rosen's also capable of a touching anxiety about Phil. Is he lonely when she's gone? Is he bored?
As maddeningly aloof as Rosen is, we empathize with her from the start. And as she takes account of her own life, she goes from being comic to pathetic to simply real. ''Dog" is a novel for any of us, of whatever age, who have taken a look at our lives and wondered how we became who we are. 