Dog War

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In a new and highly original take on Jamaican life, Winkler, the Caribbean's unrivalled master of adult comedy, introduces the estimable Precious Higginson, a large-bottomed, meltingly juicy, middle-class Jamaican woman with unshakable ideas on the right and proper behavior for Christian Jamaican women, their husbands, and men and dogs in general. But, when her husband passes away suddenly, Precious finds herself isolated in a mountainous region of Jamaica where her husband had always dreamed of living.Even worse, she finds her conventional world and her place in it coming apart--her ideas on proper behavior assailed on every side. One insulting episode after another occurs until she ends up in Miami working for a rich widow who is a fanatic about animals in general and her pampered lapdog in particular. With the indignities of life piling up on her, Precious struggles to make sense of the world she had lived in before her husband's death and to defend herself against monstrous assaults on her conventional beliefs. The climax of the story leaves Precious reeling, and sends her scurrying back home to evaluate this topsy-turvy madhouse called life and her place in it.From Publishers WeeklyAn acclaimed comic novelist in his native Jamaica, Winkler (The Lunatic) makes a long overdue American debut with this laugh riot. His heroine is Precious Higginson, a Christian Jamaican woman of 47 whose conventional worldview and proud, pious manner make her unintentionally funny. After her husband dies unexpectedly, Precious moves in with her son and his wife, but pudding-loving Precious and her health-nut daughter-in-law quickly turn the house into a war zone. It's off to America then to stay with her daughter, a Miami police officer, and her hairdressing husband, Henry, an emasculated "too-too" man who irritates her. After Henry makes a pass, Precious takes a job as live-in housekeeper at a Fort Lauderdale mansion. There, she cares for a spoiled dog, Riccardo; argues with Riccardo's animal rights zealot owner, Mistress Lucy, who declares Precious "speciest" for failing to appreciate it when Riccardo pees on her new shoes; and, after "brief Christian resistance," allows Mannish, Mistress Lucy's much peed-upon Indian chauffeur, into her bed. Precious learns much about the limits of piety as the indignities mount and her beliefs are challenged in increasingly outrageous ways. Winkler's wit, his ear for dialect and the sublime creation that is Precious add up to one howlingly funny book. (June) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From The New YorkerA Jamaican of Lebanese and Hungarian extraction, Winkler is best known for his satirical novel of Caribbean life "The Lunatic." Here he applies his wicked sensibility to immigrant experience in Florida. Newly widowed, Precious, an upstanding Jamaican with practical ideas and a conversational relationship with Jesus, becomes a maid in a Miami mansion for a pampered dog, who soon develops over-fond feelings for her person. The dog belongs to the spiritually questing Mistress Lucy, a multimillionaire among whose most pressing concerns is whether to have her Rolls "decowed"—the leather removed on moral grounds. Winkler has a fine ear for patois and dialogue, and a love of language that makes bawdy jokes crackle. Copyright © 2007 Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker