The Great Grisby: Two Thousand Years of Literary, Royal, Philosophical, and Artistic Dog Lovers and Their Exceptional Animals

Summary (from the publisher): While gradually unveiling her eight-year love affair with her French bulldog, Grisby, Mikita Brottman ruminates on the singular bond between dogs and humans. Why do prevailing attitudes warn us against loving our pet “too much”? Is her relationship with Grisby nourishing or dysfunctional, commonplace or unique? Challenging the assumption that there’s something repressed and neurotic about those deeply connected to a dog, she turns her keen eye on the many ways in which dog is the mirror of man.

The Great Grisby is organized into twenty-six alphabetically arranged chapters, each devoted to a particular human-canine union drawn from history, art, philosophy, or literature. Here is Picasso’s dachshund Lump; Freud’s chow Yofi; Bill Sikes’s mutt Bull’s Eye in Oliver Twist; and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel Flush, whose biography was penned by Virginia Woolf. There are royal dogs, like Prince Albert’s greyhound Eos, and dogs cherished by authors, like Thomas Hardy’s fox terrier, Wessex. Brottman’s own beloved Grisby serves as an envoy for sniffing out these remarkable companions.

Quirky and delightful, and peppered with incisive personal reflections and back-and-white sketches portraying a different dog and its owner, The Great Grisby reveals how much dogs have to teach us about empathy, happiness, love—and what it means to be human.

 

Review: I received an uncorrected proof copy of this book from HarperCollins.

 

The Great Grisby is an ode to man's best friend, unveiled in twenty-six chapters, the A to Z chapters each named for a famous dog. These include both fictional and historical dogs from Prince Albert's greyhound to Elizabeth Barrett Browning's spaniel. Each chapter is a chance for the author to ponder her own, but also human's relationship, with dogs.

 

Despite their importance in our everyday life, the dogs of well-known individuals are often overlooked by history. For example, despite reading several biographies about Queen Victoria's husband Albert, I never knew that he had a beloved greyhound named Eos, so beloved that the queen commissioned several portraits featuring the dog. I also never knew that George Washington had coonhounds named "Drunkard, Taster, Tipler, and Tipsy; he also had American staghounds named Sweetlips and Scentwell" (76-77). I was surprised to learn that it was a "commonplace racket in Victorian London" to steal dogs in order to force their owners to ransom them back (50).

 

At times, I felt like Brottman's analysis of dog's significance went a bit too far. For example, concerning David Copperfield, she argues that "by breaking all the rules, Jip is a living embodiment of Dora's unruly id. The dog enacts everything Dora strives to repress" (86). Brottman also breaks down pet owner's propensity to animate their dogs; "to speak in the voice of your dog is to engage in an act of self-deceiving ventriloquism, allowing you to be at the same time both beloved child and adoring parent. In this voice, you can buffer complaints, elicit apologies, confess wrongdoings, and mediate outlawed or forbidden impulses" (61). I don't necessarily disagree with her assertions, however, I felt her book was stronger when it relied more on historical examples than delving into deep significance to explain further what we know - people love their dogs.

 

There was something very about poignant reading this book, while sitting beside my own dog, because there is something inexplicable and ferocious about our relationship with our pets. "We keep our dogs to the very end, she observes, even when they are 'mange-ridden, scabbed with eczema, half-paralyzed, cataracts in both eyes - not to mention that dreadful old dog smell.' [...] Dogs adore us steadily and without change until the end, which makes it easy to love them back the same way" (190). And yet, no dog compares to your own dog, as each dog owner is secretly sure "in the knowledge that our own dog is unquestionably superior" (207).

 

Stars: 3