MixedThe New York Times Sunday Book ReviewAs a novel about the consequences of addiction — particularly heroin addiction — Even the Dogs is harrowing. It details the physical, psychological, social and environmental damage, and portrays the all-consuming nature of the life … But McGregor’s devotion to craft comes at a significant cost to a reader’s emotional engagement with his characters and story. His technique intrudes, becomes showy...The result of all the literary pyrotechnics, and the way they call attention to the writing itself, is that scenes that should be unbearably emotional — as when Robert is visited by his teenage daughter for the first time in many years and she sees the squalor of his life — fall flat, because we have no visceral connection with the characters. The author has imagined a story filled with vital, gripping material, but he is too busy claiming our attention to let us lose ourselves in it.
Colm Tóibín
RaveThe Los AngelesTóibín offers a scaled-down work, the formally restrained account of a young woman's ragged, almost unconscious struggle for independence and self-expression … Tóibín is strong at depicting the way restrained passion works … Tóibín, writing about the crippling power of conformity, bursts the bounds he has established for his story … Form echoes theme in the novel's final 50 pages, as Eilis acts in ways that challenge all we thought we (and she, and everyone) knew of her … Thrown upon her own devices, she seems heartbreakingly herself at last.
