‘Off the Leash’: Dog park life breaks out at a full run
OFF THE LEASH: A YEAR AT THE DOG PARK Matthew Gilbert St. Martin’s Press 227 pp.
Matthew Gilbert’s debut book has it all: love, hate, sickness, death, betrayal, romance — and a whole lot of poop.
The stars of this particularly delightful romp are primarily of
the four-legged kind. Off the Leash: A Year at the Dog Park chronicles Gilbert’s introduction to dog ownership and his indoctrination into the world of dog parks and their eclectic inhabitants.
Gilbert, TV critic for The Boston Globe, is an unlikely contributor to the ever-growing canon of canine memoir. A self-proclaimed non-dog person, he informs the reader that it was his love for a dog person, his husband, Tom, and not of dogs that led to his becoming co-parent to a feisty yellow Lab named Toby.
Gilbert ventures from his digital bubble of TV, where he enjoys its “pleasing equation of being there plus not being there,” and with Toby braves the dog park that is blocks from his home, but might as well be a world away.
What follows is an endearing and entertaining account of their first year at the park. He writes: “Embracing a dog, like embracing a person, is taking on the unpredictable, the mysterious, the joy- ous, and some days, the terrible.”
The same can be said of the characters he and Toby encounter. It’s not all love at the dog park. He describes an anthropological microcosm where owners gossip and judge one another based on their “parenting ” skills.
And of course, there is the poop. Gilbert’s cataloging of owners as poop mimes, poop delinquents and poop rebels is not just humorous but dead-on.
And so wonderfully does Gilbert flesh out the idiosyncrasies of his park compatriots that when he later compares them to beloved TV characters, you can’t help but laugh and exclaim, “Exactly!” No wonder NBC has already optioned the book.
Leash is at times playful, at times profound, and always fun.