Francine Prose's "Dog Stories" is, perhaps after Rick Bass's "Antlers", the-best-known new story to be published in the 11/90 quarterly issue of Special Report: Fiction, one of a set of eight magazines published for several years by Whittle Communications for distribution to doctors' office waiting rooms (the issue, with the theme of non-human animals and our interactions, also reprints a story by Colette). Prose's story was selected by Alice Adams for the 1991 volume of Best American Short Stories (from the set of stories presented to her by series editor Katrina Kenison), the only story from Special Report: Fiction to be so included during the magazine's run. Prose included it in her 1996 collection The Peaceable Kingdom.
Reading it, finally, today, in the oversized pages of the Special Report issue (about as large as Life, Look or The Saturday Evening Post in the late '60s, or American Poetry Review or The New York Review of Books today) with ads and center-page illustrations not atypical of slick magazines, is a bit distracting, particularly with one page of the story's text across from a full-page sort-of house ad touting U.S. doctors generally, with a nearly full-sized woman's face just above that of the infant she's holding, and the headline "Amy Lyn Hollander Is My 734th Child"...a steady diet of books, digest and little magazines might lead one to be used to the occasional illustration or book ad, but relatively few full-color human faces peering intently at the reader from the corner of one's eye. Other occasional fiction magazine projects, designed by typical slick commercial magazine staff, such as Mary Higgins Clark Mystery Magazine from the Family Circle folks half a decade later, can feel very Busy in comparison to their less page-design-heavy colleagues, or even the fiction pages as usually presented in the likes of Harper's, The American Scholar or The New Yorker, or the rare other slick magazine still publishing fiction.
My scanner is not quite working, but I'll hope to have an image up soon of the Special Report: Fiction issue.
It's an unsurprisingly good story, told from the point of view of a woman on her wedding day, marrying a man she's lived with for some time, pregnant with their child and sharing parenting duties with him of her son from a previous relation, the son being of somewhat but not extraordinarily special needs attention. Their house is undergoing some renovation at the time of the wedding, but nonetheless they are holding the ceremony in their house and yard; the groom is one of the designers and builders of the house, and one of the carpenters, the most industrious of them and the most handsome, has been invited, and to add to the generally stress of he situation, the bride to be has recently been bitten by a large dog while attempting to visit a barn sale, to buy a work sink on display there for the painting studio being built into the house. Christine, the bride and a professional painter and former teacher, is slightly surprised by the amount of tension even a relatively informal wedding party is inducing in her. The story is relatively short, and everything described as happening has her spin on it, hyper-aware, analytical or regretful or nostalgic (or some combination) as they come, including some thoughts of how her recent unfortunate encounter with a stranger and her biting dog differs from her most frequently-told dog anecdote, one about her fiancé's dog Alexander and his passion for a collie in heat he meets one day. It's a story less about earthshattering changes in the lives of the key characters than the realization that all the important parts of their lives have been in place before the wedding and that things are good, if not in several ways ideal. And that the awkwardnesses of social interaction can be endured, even when tiresome, or mixed bags, much as they are during the wedding, while pregnant and beginning to show, and suffering minor post-bite throbbing.
Please see today's other Short Story Wednesday selections at Patti Abbott's blog
