My Life as a Dog

For Dan Rhodes, the chief appeal of writing for a living was not having to get up in the morning. In spite of that slacker attitude, Rhodes, 31, this month finds himself on Granta magazine's prestigious decennial list of the 20 Best of Young British Novelists, standing on the shoulders of giants like Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie, and rubbing his own with publishing hotshots Zadie Smith and Toby Litt. Rhodes' presence there is all the more remarkable since his first novel, Timoleon Vieta Come Home (Canongate; 214 pages), is only now arriving in bookstores and is likely, he says, to be his last. The grind of writing Timoleon Vieta, Rhodes says, has cost him too much, and though he's flattered by his newfound status, his bigger consolation is that the ordeal is over. If the remainder rack beckons for Timoleon Vieta, he might return to the Tunbridge Wells, England, bookshop he worked in until last July; should the book turn him into the Next Big Thing, he'd sink the proceeds in a little château in France and no doubt a better bed from which to contemplate his desk. "I haven't had a good idea for months," he says. "It's very liberating."

Despite finding its way onto Granta's list, Timoleon Vieta Come Home has neither the contemporary crackle of Smith and Litt, nor the intellectual and verbal grandeur of Amis and McEwan. Instead, Rhodes writes straight from — and about — the heart. Timoleon Vieta is the name of a beloved, scruffy pooch who belongs to Carthusians Cockcroft, an aging, gay, composer who has retired, sad and alone, to the Umbrian countryside, where he boozes and listlessly cruises for some thrill to replace the boy in silver shorts who broke his heart. When a young, brutish (and dog-hating) man known only as the Bosnian comes to stay, Cockcroft foolishly agrees to abandon the dog in Rome. Trekking home to his master, Timoleon Vieta, "with eyes as pretty as a girl's," charms food, ear tickles and hapless, bizarre love stories out of the strangers he meets.

Disappointed love is the sole subject of Rhodes' two earlier books of short stories, and the dog's journey neatly leads his author back to this familiar and fertile form. His first book, Anthropology, consisted of 101 bleak and charming love stories, each of exactly 101 words. His second collection, Don't Tell Me the Truth About Love, featured, among other oddities, a besotted Vietnamese boy who has himself turned into a cello so he can lie forever in the arms of a young woman who only has music in her heart. The affair does not end happily.

Indeed, few of Rhodes' tales have conventionally happy endings. For example, in one of Timoleon Vieta's romantic detours, we read of the deaf and diligent daughter Aurora, who falls hard for a local hoodlum, to the horror of her whole family. All, that is, except for the canny grandmother, who tells Aurora she is doomed to act out one of the oldest stories in the book; the one where the bad boy makes good, the couple settles into domestic bliss and she forgets her dream of becoming a doctor. Aurora promptly dumps him with a farewell note; the boy soaks himself with petrol and uses the note to ignite it. She is wracked with remorse and everyone blames her; he recovers, only to realize he always had a fancy for another girl, famed for having two sets of teeth.

All of which makes it a bit alarming that Rhodes says his love tales are written from experience — though it would explain the exhaustion that has led him to lay down his pen. "I don't want to go back to that level of commitment where writing takes over my life for years," he says. "And I'd hate to write with less dedication." In Timoleon Vieta Come Home, at least, he manages to conjure for Cockcroft a happy ending of sorts. Yet readers will weep instead for the fate of poor Timoleon Vieta, the most faithful and devoted lover of all the characters in the book, whose reward when he gets home is ... well, it shouldn't happen to a dog.

Like Aurora's grandmother, Rhodes understands the subversive power of the simple tale, well told. And it's the tradition of European fairy and folktales that his stories evoke — where fixed notions of place and time evaporate, plots and passions hinge on chance encounters, and deform-ity and magic are the stuff of life. Despite his low profile to date in Britain, Rhodes' fabulist books have been translated into nine languages. And Timoleon Vieta is a very un-British novel. Not that it matters. It is funny, beguiling and sentimental, with a dark undertow that will tug at the memory at least until Granta publishes its next list in 2013. Rhodes won't be on it because he'll be too old. But here's hoping he keeps finding a reason to get out of bed.