El arte de conducir bajo la lluvia (The Art of Racing in the Rain) Book

You know that guy who comes up to you when you're having a bad day and says something like, "just think positive thoughts and good things will happen" as if it were really that simple? As if the spirit of Karma or whatever is patiently waiting around for you to will happiness upon yourself so that it can be befittingly bestowed? Yeah, well fuck that guy. Bad things happen all the time to people who don't deserve it, regardless of whether or not they are in touch with their "positive energies." Similarly, people who are jerks are at no greater risk of having a safe fall on their heads while they walk down the sidewalk than anybody else is. Not in the real world, anyway.

Apparently this book does not take place in the real world.

By now, I think it is pretty much known that this book is written from the perspective of a dog. While this may be a turnoff for a lot of people, it is not what ruined it for me; I can be very open to unconventional styles of storytelling. No, what ruined it for me is the fact that the entire thing is horribly botched.

First of all, when you are a writer and you choose to narrate your tale through the eyes and ears of man's best friend, you need to adhere to your own limitations. If your story involves any kind of tromping through courthouses, police stations, or hospitals, YOU CANNOT GO THERE. Nor can you give your canine narrator ESP or amazing powers of deductive reasoning, either, as compensation. That is cheating.

Second, please don't be smarmy. You are already asking your reader to suspend his convictions enough to buy into this whole concept of a dog harnessing a human soul; please do not expect him to swallow that your dog is also an earthy-crunchy environmentalist with a belief in the law of attraction and a distrust of the medical community to boot, because that is just asking too much. When you do that, you expose yourself as a fraud trying to push your own agenda onto the reader through your characters. Again, cheating. (And as an aside, I can assure you that doctors and drug companies are not sitting around boardroom tables scheming over how to swindle sick people out of all their money. How ridiculous.)

Putting all this aside, the book still fails on so many other levels. Its characters are hollow shells, driven by motivations I could in no way relate to. This, in turn, translates to an exceedingly weak plot in which events occur unnaturally, giving the entire novel a contrived quality. It also tries'constantly'to draw analogies to race car driving, which comes off sounding rather pathetic. And its ending actually nauseated me. Truly, I am at a loss to explain the popularity of The Art of Racing in the Rain, because really? This book is for the dogs.