The Eventual Gander: The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs.

If I can't come up with an aphorism to start this review with, at least I can think of one to ignore completely: Alexander McCall Smith's The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs has a fine cover. Of course this doesn't matter in any book you're reading for literary merit, which would have the same intrinsic value whether it was read out loud, Morse'd over a telegraph or even read hunched over a Palm Pilot with a screen too small and too dim for true appreciation. But this is not a book of "literary merit". It is, at best, a good way to feed a habit of pseudo-intellectualism. When I saw this book lying on the table at Kepler's, my mouth started salivating and my neurons releasing endorphins in the same anticipation a junkie must feel at that first call of "Crack rock ho!" (ho, here, in the "Land Ho!" sense, not the Noelle Bush sense).

That I, a pseudo-intellectual on the way up would stoop to the level of paying $9.95 for 128 pages of tripe might seem paradoxical. But this is not a book to be read, it is a book to be consumed. The aforementioned cover has texture, two colors of ink, and no fewer than four well-designed fonts all selected to contrast their roles to one another. Framed in the center is a delightful illustration of a dachshund, sized up in anatomical consideration. If all this detail sounds like pretension, that is only because this is pretension of the highest kind. It is not exclusionary, it is not off-putting. It is simply something that is to be enjoyed.

My editors tell me I should, at some point, get to the book itself. The staff at my local bookorium had placed it in Sci-Fi/Mystery. But this tome eschews such a simple taxonomic view of writing, instead labeling itself "A Professor Dr. von Igelfeld Entertainment." What this means is that it has the same sort of bumbling main character, intrigue, and rich detail that a mystery has, but without any of that pesky murder, whodunit, or actual matter to be investigated. The result is a travel tale without any real root in plot, truth, history, or narrative necessity. It is as if Dr. McCall Smith is asking us to take a vacation not only from our own lives in reading this text, but to take a vacation from what we think an author properly ought to do.

Dr. von Igelfeld, the protagonist, is a hugely compelling character, and I hope to read the other two books starring him to see if perhaps he was developed in something that approached a true adventure at some point. He has the powers of neither perception nor deception. The result being that slights uncommitted are paid back in slights unnoticed. His worldview is, at times, beyond simplistic: he is the author of a scholarly text, "Portugese Irregular Verbs" and that should put him beyond reproach or question. Anyone who thinks otherwise does not understand the way the system works. His administrative prowess is best demonstrated when he asks, of a religious conflict, "If he were the Patriarch, the could he not unilaterally put an end to schism simply by expelling schismatics? That is what von Igelfeld himself would have done."

Sure, I could quibble about the narration (switches point-of-view arbitrarily and not enough to be a true device. A choice made rarely enough is only a crutch.) But why? This is an enormously fun and quick read. The intellectual equivalent of slapstick opens it up as he is mistakenly sent to lecture on the Sausage Dog (the beginning of the intertwined confusions) and, out of a desire not to offend his host, never corrects the impression. Puns in turn lead to surgery on one of the elongated beasts by our Philologist hero with the expectedly disastrous results somehow leading to an interaction between our man and (an extreme farce of) the Bishop of Rome (a caricature felt all the more deeply in this Papal intermission).

It is not hard to see how Faulkner's prose is a deep cigar. Something you sit down with for hours on end, to appreciate its complexities and how its flavor changes as you go on. Hemingway is a pipe: a completely different way of looking at the habit. Sure, you don't inhale and you smoke less less often, but it's a more potent smoke. Which is the more dangerous? Who could ever compare the two? A subscription to The New Yorker is, then, like an addiction to Camel Lights: You remember that you wanted to start, but now it's a chore instead of a pleasure and you can't quite remember *why* you wanted to start. On this scale, The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs is a pack of Nat Shermans or Dunhills: you pay more for its luxurious packaging and beneficial image. In short, it can be recommended for everything but its substance.

Jugdgment: Keep one on your shelf, as a rainy-day reading list. To be opened only in times of extreme depression or boredom when even other fare as light on the intellectual scale as an Austen or a Chabon would be cerebral overload.