Book Review: Travels with Casey

Travels with Casey: My Journey Through Our Dog-Crazy CountryBy Benoit Denizet-LewisSimon & Schuster, 2014 During the time when freelance writer Benoit Denizet-Lewis was walking his dog Casey in beautiful parks of Jamaica Plain in Massachusetts, he was also planning a book in which he put Casey in an RV and took the two of them on voyage of exploration and maybe self-discovery across America. When he broached the idea to a longtime acquaintance “who says things out loud that normal people merely think privately,” that acquaintance was fairly blunt, bringing up John Steinbeck’s 1962 book Travels with Charley and saying, “Benoit, your book’s already been done by a better writer than you.”He disagreed, of course. In Travels with Charley, the poodle was a prop and the focus was the American people, whereas in Denizet-Lewis’s book, Travels with Casey, the dog is the star, and the focus isn’t Americans in general but rather the millions of Americans who’ve in one way or another built their lives around dogs.The opening gimmick of the book – because nonfiction books like absolutely need a gimmick if they’re to have any shot at the summer book-trade – is the author’s suspicion that his dog isn’t particularly fond of him; their road trip is billed as a bonding experience. Even for book-gimmicks, this is fairly creaky stuff, and mercifully, it’s dropped for the bulk of the book.What we get instead is a sparklingly entertaining snapshot of the dog-besotted United States, along with deft little digressions on the immediate history of the dog-human relationship, including evocations of some of the bad old days:

Back in the 1970s, before picking up after your pooch was an expectation of canine ownership, the city’s sidewalks and parks had been littered with dog doo. In an 1975 letter to The New York Times, a grumpy New Yorker had lamented the sad, soiled state of Central Park: “It has become a dumping ground for defecating dogs … The crisp green grass, the smell of blossoming cherry trees, the playing fields are all being taken from us by the hordes of dogs that romp freely … Can nothing be done? Are we all to be slaves to people who find pleasure in keeping Great Danes in three-room apartments?”

Denizet-Lewis interviews dog yoga instructors, dog unit police, dog photographers, dog doctors, dog walkers, and dog-fanciers of all kinds, from authors like Amy Hempel and Armistead Maupin to dog-charlatans like Cesar Milan (presented in these pages with considerably more generosity than he deserves) and including dog-champions like Ingrid Newkirk, founder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, who’s quoted in mid-rant a very pleasing number of times:

Ingrid went on, calling out people who leave their dog home alone for too long. “I tell people, ‘If you expect your dog to hold it for eight hours, then you hold it for eight hours at work,’” she said. “See how that feels. Because dogs don’t have any supernatural powers.”

Perhaps it’s only natural that in a narrative of some 300 pages there’ll be irritating bits, and Denizet-Lewis isn’t exempt. Like many dog-enthusiasts, for instance, he tends to get careless and a bit arrogant when it comes to the fact that some people aren’t dog-enthusiasts. One incident in a camp outside Santa Fe stands out:

I didn’t have Casey on his leash, and for whatever reason he found the woman worthy of further inspection. He galloped toward her, his head held high. The woman didn’t see or hear Casey approaching, and he made it all the way to her side before she let out a horrified shriek. Her toiletry bag hit the dirt with a thud.“Get that dog away from me!” she screamed, pivoting stiffly to locate me, the irresponsible dog owner.I called Casey back to me and apologized profusely. “I’m so sorry,” I said, as she fumbled to remove her headphones. “He’s friendly and just wanted to say hello.”“You need to learn to control your dog,” she said, wagging her finger at me. “Dogs bite.”“Casey doesn’t bite,” I assured her. “He might lick you to death. But he doesn’t bite."She shook her head dismissively. “All dogs bite.”I wondered if she really believed that. After all, Casey hadn’t bitten her – even as she’d screamed and nearly dropped her toiletry bag on his head. He’d simply backed away, his head down and his tail between his legs. As the woman picked up her bad and walked off in a huff, I was sorry we’d met this way. I would have liked a chance to speak with her about her cynophobia – her fear of dogs.

It’s obvious immediately that the woman in the story doesn’t necessarily suffer from a phobia about dogs and that she’s entirely right to be upset when she’s surprised by a strange dog who’s not on a leash. Maybe not all dogs bite, but even the gentlest dogs can bite if they’re startled – it’s just lucky that Casey didn’t consider her reaction an attack.But such irritations are rare; Benoit is in fact a wonderful, doting dog-owner, and the made-for-TV-movie uplifting ending is no less satisfying for being predictable. Casey is a good dog, and our author is a good writer, and as Steinbeck knew, that’s always a bankable combination.