Noted: Lauren Groff's "Dogs Go Wolf" in the New Yorker

The New Yorker publishes a new short story almost every week, and sometimes I offer a brief reaction here. This isn’t a deeply considered or finely crafted review. It’s just my two cents.

This week’s story is “Dogs Go Wolf” by Lauren Groff (story, audio, interview). Groff has published three novels (The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, and Fates and Furies) and one collection of short stories (Delicate Edible Birds), all since 2008. Among her many other honors, President Obama tabbed Fates and Furies as his favorite novel of 2015. The New Yorker interview with Groff about this story is well worth reading for her inspired rant about cowboys (“momma don’t let your boys grow up to be” is the takeaway), though cowboys don’t figure in “Dogs Go Wolf.”

The urgency of this story is clear from the outset: two sisters, ages seven and four, are abandoned on an island with a dog and must fend for themselves in increasingly dire circumstances. It is realistic in style, but it does have several “stories within a story” when the older sister invents tales to pass the time and sooth her sibling. Their “castaway” status and invented folktales give the story an archaic flair, a hint of Crusoe/Swiss Family Robinson/Tempest.

At the same time, there are grim (no pun intended) realities at hand, both in the sisters’ struggle to find enough food to survive and flashbacks to the volatile family life that led to their abandonment, though the specifics of the latter are left somewhat vague. Heartstrings are tugged, but without lapsing into sentimentality, melodrama, or treacle, as could easily have happened given the setup. Indeed, the dog in the story is kind of a pain in the ass, as opposed to the more usual deployment of fictional canids as noble bearers of good sentiments.

The heart of this story, to me, is the relationship between the sisters. Most of it is told from the point of view of the older sister, but at the outset there seem to be a few slips into a more omniscient narrative voice: “she was a good mother” and, of the dog, “the animal was torn between his hatred of children and his hatred of the wild storm outside.” Those hints of another narrator, though, seemed to fit with the kind of castaway tale this story seems to be consciously referencing, so they worked for me.

No particular sentence is likely to take your breath away, but the overall impact is a powerful one, a real sense of sibling alliance in the face of the grim realities of life, especially grim here. The children are forced to become feral, but this has the impact of strengthening their bond. As the title references, they revert from the petty rivalries of domesticity to the stick-together-or-perish nature of the wild. Come to think of it, there might also be a dash of Jack London in this story as well.

The one move I’d question is a flash forward near the end of the story, where we learn in some detail what is to become of both girls in the future. To me, this seemed not of a piece with the rest of the story, and was perhaps motivated by a desire to impose a certain kind of feeling at the end of the story (I’m being vague to avoid spoilers). To me, the flash forward spelled out something---the eternal desire of the older sibling to protect the younger---that I had already gotten from the story itself.

But a minor quibble or two aside, I think this is a well-done story and I enjoyed reading it. Two family members more-or-less united in conflict against nature is a refreshing change from the more common fictional circumstance of siblings being at each others’ throats.

Additional thoughts on this story can be found at the website The Mookse and the Gripes here. Again, the above is just my quick reaction to this story, so please take it for what it is.