"The dog in question is Marilyn Monroe's companion and he's feeling bad because he's just bitten Edmund Wilson."
Mary-Kay Wilmers
Mary-Kay Wilmers is editor of the London Review of Books and author of The Eitingons: A Twentieth-Century Story.
'A cool breeze was coming off the river. I felt bad, not ashamed, just
egotistical and unhelpful, the kind of dog you wouldn't want to share
your life with, like one of those mutts in Conan Doyle.' The dog in
question is Marilyn Monroe's companion, Maf, short for Mafia (he was a
present from Frank Sinatra), and he's feeling bad because he's just
bitten Edmund Wilson. He's the hero of Andrew O'Hagan's new novel, which
I've been reading in typescript, The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog
and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe. He's a wonderfully thoughtful and
witty dog who makes a note of all the conversations he hears around him,
animal as well as human, mulls them over and in so doing assembles a
chronicle of America in the early 1960s.
I've also been reading Mary Beard's blog, now in book form, the
wonderfully bracing and argumentative It's a Don's Life and re-reading
J.G. Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur, about the Indian Mutiny, which
many people think is the best Booker-winner there's been. I would have
agreed until this year when, as I see it, Wolf Hall pips it to the post.
Thursday, 19 November, 2009
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