Characters whose affiliations deplete and destroy instead of nurturing them – ONE GOOD DOG by Susan Wilson provides two such characters, and only one of them is a dog. Adam March draws the reader's sympathy as his past is slowly revealed in brief snatches of recollection. Abandoned to foster homes as a child, he has almost completely erased his past, filling it with his ambition for social status and material success. These are his answer to the impotence he felt as a child. Adam is completely oblivious to the cost he has paid to “belong” – no friends, no intimates. When he loses his job he is set adrift: “His friends, plucked from the ranks of people like himself, the self he was for the last twenty years, rich, powerful, well connected, don't return his calls. He is anathema.” So far, this may seem like familiar fictional territory. What makes this book special is the juxtaposition of viewpoints, and the deceptively understated writing.

The dog is a mixed breed pit bull trained by a street gang of dog fighters. He is tough, street-smart, but also intelligent and sensitive enough to rationalize and repress his own feelings of fear and displacement when he escapes and takes up life on the street. Wilson's imaginative story draws out the parallel between these two lives . Part of the story is how these two unlikely characters come to cross paths. Another part deals with Adam's fractured relationship with his daughter, Ariel. Still another deals with Adam's struggle to build new connections forged out of trust and not fear. There is an underlying courage and tenacity in both Adam and the dog that we come to appreciate at the deepest level thanks to the unforced beauty of the writing.

Wilson's prose is characterized by extraordinary grace and restraint. In the dog's voice, we hear: “I don't recall ever being touched by them [the dogfighters] in a nonbusiness way. . . . Had either of those two young men ever dared unmuzzle me and pat my head, I would have licked his hand. They were afraid of me, of what they had created.” The line of the narration is similarly simplified. Excess detail about due process when Adam loses his job is cut away, and time feels compressed as Wilson focuses almost exclusively on the forward momentum of the many spiritual journeys to be made in this book. In the end, there is a feeling of completeness and satisfaction.