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The thing about Gonker was, if nobody found him, he was going to die. The dog had Addison's disease, an affliction of the adrenal gland that requires monthly injections. So when he bounded into the underbrush of the Appalachian forest in October 1998 and didn't come back, Fielding Marshall had only 20 days to find his best friend.
Portland author Pauls Toutonghi, who happens to be Fielding's brother-in-law, takes an intriguing parcel of family lore—the fervid (some would call it obsessive) hunt for a missing pet—and uses it to explore histories of abuse and illness that cloud an otherwise idyllic suburban household. Dog Gone (Knopf, 272 pages, $25) is a quick read with a deceptively humble focus: how dogs impact the lives of the humans who care for them.
But as we get to know Fielding and his family, we see the dogs in their lives filling the cracks pried open by broken human relationships. For Fielding's mother, a Japanese Akita becomes a source of affection and comfort during some of the darkest moments of a traumatic childhood. He "[rescued] her, and [stood] by her, in the midst of the vast wilderness" of her mother's anger and addiction. For Fielding, Gonker helps to heal the wounds of a whirlwind college romance that ended with the death of his girlfriend's infant. Dog Gone's most compelling moments emerge in these backstories.
Toutonghi has a formal writing style, as well as a tendency to analyze his own story as he's telling it. In the book's prologue, he informs readers that what they're about to encounter is "really about duty and death, about the way our past shapes our present, and the way we fill our necessary roles most vividly in a crisis."
But the book treats its subjects kindly, and over the course of 54 short chapters, we begin to view the trials of the Marshall family with a sincerity and suspension of judgment that most of us want from the animals in our lives but only rarely enjoy from the humans.
"Dogs," Toutonghi writes, "burrow into the deepest parts of ourselves. They live inside of us, in a part of our soul that we don't normally access." In Dog Gone, Toutonghi burrows just as deeply into some of his family's most painful memories. He is trusting us to treat them with the same kindness and humilty he shows.
GO: Pauls Toutonghi reads at Powell's City of Books, 1001 W Burnside St., 503-228-4651, powells.com, on Friday, June 17. 7:30 pm. Free.
Willamette Week