Review: Dogfight, A Love Story

Dogfight, A Love Story by Matt Burgess
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This one is written by the brother of a girlfriend of a friend of mine. That’s distant enough that I doubt I’ll ever meet the guy, but it does give me a sense that I could someday find myself in conversation with him. That’s enough to incline me toward this without biasing me in its favor.

And the truth is, I don’t need much biasing here. This has all sorts of ingredients I am prepped to love. Our protagonist is Alfredo, a generally sweet kid who just happens to sell a few drugs and beat up the occasional person. And, oh yeah, determine to arrange an underground dog fight where – if all goes according to the eventual plan – he’ll turn his newly paroled brother back into the police and double-cross everyone in the neighborhood on bets.

But it’s hard to hold larceny like that against a kid who seems the only one in his world capable of real love. He didn’t mean to court Isabel – she was his newly jailed brother’s girlfriend – but it just sort of happened. And he turns out, objectively, to be a much better boyfriend. He cares about her, looks after her. Even, stunningly, listens to her as a partner and fellow human. It’s easy to see why she prefers him to Tariq; for all of his innate screw-up qualities, he’s trying to be a good man.

I don’t think the version of Queens that we get here actually exists, but that’s OK with me. Instead, it’s a multi-ethnic fantasy where Latinos, African-Americans, Jews, and the occasional nondescript white cops all mingle. Everyone is after an edge of some kind, so everyone sort of tolerates everyone else as a way of making personal peace.

There’s a large shot of nostalgia shot things. Max Marshmallow is an old Jewish guy who’s bought a bodega, left it more or less the same, but insisted on calling it a “candy shop” after the institutions of his late 1950s youth. Mike Schiffren, a Russian immigrant and likely Jewish kid, has set up as the local drug lord, but he’s only mid-level. The cops range from lazily to mildly corrupt, but they have their ambition within the force. Everyone’s scrambling for a chance at something. Like the most compelling cities, whether naked or partly clothed, there are stories everywhere.

The good news is that Burgess generally tells those stories well. It may be a bit much to find that everything happens in the space of a day or so, but everything moves along easily and cleverly. Burgess is a strong, literate writer, and he fills us in with what we need as he goes along.

I get a little tired of some of the narrative gimmicks, though. Alfredo’s inner monologue is often colored by the metaphor of his private file cabinet of memories, hopes, and grievances. Isabel often finds herself in deep conversation with her unborn child. Tariq is always trying to determine what “the book” – the Koran – would tell him to do. While I like the characters, the tropes got old.

There’s also a strange and possibly clumsy afterword here, a final chapter that picks things up more than a year later and shows us Alfredo and Isabel in their new lives. It seems an acknowledgement that the first part ended without quite wrapping things up, but then it also seems to suggest we’ll get a full sequel.

Those are small points in the larger structure of a book that I mostly enjoyed. This may be dated now; a decade after Burgess wrote it, he’d likely find much less tolerance for the implicit cultural appropriation here. That saddens me some, though. This is ultimately a generous-spirited book, and I think it’s fantasy of different peoples coming into conflict is something work exploring.

The blurbs compare this work to Jonathan Lethem (one of my favorites) but I don’t quite see that. Instead, I think it’s more a next-generation Elmore Leonard – a book that fits real and feeling characters into a world so saturated with irony that they become all more memorable and poignant.


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