‘Dog Heaven’ by Stephanie Vaughn

Another final story, this one from the end of Vaughn’s first (and final) collection, Sweet Talk. I will never be a dog person but this at least helped me understand their appeal. It takes the bold (and usually disastrous) step of ventriloquising an animal but, in this case, pulls it off with ease. ‘My name is Duke! My name is Duke!’ the dog says. ‘Wake up! Wake up!’

First published in The New Yorker, January 1, 1989 and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Sweet Talk, Other Press, 2012

‘Dog Heaven’ by Stephanie Vaughn

“Every so often that dead dog dreams me up again,” is another of my favourite opening lines, and maybe the best answer to that pesky question of narrative imperative i.e. Why is this story being told now? What follows is the narrator’s childhood memories—framed as a dead dog’s dream—of the last few months her family spent living on an army base in Fort Niagara in the before moving to another post in Oklahoma. As army brats, the narrator and her best friend Sparky are outcasts amongst the “civilian children” at school. It’s the 1980s, and their attempts to fit in by learning how to skate, wearing the right hats and gloves, and running for student government, are shadowed by the threat of nuclear war and their teacher’s pointed reminder that “in the whole history of the human species only one country had ever used the worst weapon ever invented.”

It’s Duke, that beloved long-dead dog, who gives her childhood a sense of innocence, earning a permanent place in the family mythology for his spectacular feats, including running fourteen miles through an ice storm to return home. I love a dog story, and one the things that makes Duke an unforgettable dog character is his voice, his barks translated by Vaughn into gleeful, urgent expressionist: “My name is Duke! My name is Duke! I’m your dog! I’m your dog!” People who love this story as much as I do often marvel at the fact that Vaughn has not published another book since her collection Sweet Talk in 1990. But I think of ‘Dog-Heaven’ and its note-perfect ending, and wonder if she simply said everything she wanted to say.

First published in The New Yorker, January 1, 1989 and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Sweet Talk, Other Press, 2012

‘Dog Heaven’ by Stephanie Vaughn

If you want to get American fiction writers of a certain age talking, mention this story, which begins, “Every so often that dead dog dreams me up again.” It’s about some army brats at Fort Niagara in Upstate New York, but it’s about life and death and failing to fit in. It has one of the most beautiful ending of any story I know, and one of the best dog characters in all of literature. Like many stories on this list I read it in those days in which I examined every story as though it were a writing manual. I was stymied every time. How did they do it? Eventually I realized that if I could figure that out, the story was no good. ‘Dog Heaven’ is so lovely a story – why hasn’t Vaughn published any more books since Sweet Talk in 1990? – that I don’t want to describe it. I want, instead, to sneak into your house and read it to you, standing a little too closely, so you can feel my hot breath in your ear.

First published in The New Yorker, January 1, 1989, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in Sweet Talk, Random House, 1990

‘Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog’ by Stephanie Vaughn

“When I was twelve years old,” the narrator, Gemma, begins, “my father was tall and awesome.” But her father ends up far from his vigorous younger self — reclusive, depressed, an alcoholic drinking himself to death — and her story revolves around her fondest memories of the man at the most difficult time in his life, essentially representing her efforts to breathe some life back into a soul misrepresented by those who survived him. “In the eulogy” at his funeral, she says, “he was remembered for having survived the first wave of the invasion of Normandy.” Among the funeral attendees, however, he was instead admired “for having been the proprietor of a chain of excellent hardware stores.” Gemma tries to find words to reanimate the man who she knew as someone between those two extreme versions of himself — between the dashing wartime hero and the buttoned-down, Eisenhower-era shopkeeper — and she takes her lead from the words her father gave her when she was a child. The clue is in the title; the meaning of the words is a bond between parent and child and, through the child’s recollections in adulthood, between a man misunderstood by the world and the man he really was.

from Sweet Talk, Random House 1990; listen to it read aloud by Tea Obreht here