The Last Days of Dogtown by Anita Diamant (2005, Hardcover)

Anita Diamant's The Last Days of Dogtown is a radical departure from the biblical setting of her best-selling novel, The Red Tent. Her backdrop for this melancholy tale is the windswept shores of Cape Ann, Massachusetts in the early days of the nineteenth century. The declining hamlet, nicknamed Dogtown by detractors, is home to a pack of semi-feral dogs and an eclectic group of residents too stubborn, too poverty stricken, too worn down, or too old to relocate to nearby Gloucester.

A group of widows, witches, spinsters, whores, abused and neglected children, freed slaves, and one particularly odious villain populate the ramshackle hovels that dot the ruggedly stark landscape. At the center of a series of heart-wrenching sagas is Judy Rhines, a kindhearted maiden who harbors a secret so scandalous that its revelation would bring her instant ruin and tear the moribund town apart. One by one, the animal and human characters die or move away, sealing the fate of the disintegtrating community.

In The Red Tent Diamant uses broad, brilliant brush strokes of prose to create the portrait of her Old Testament visions of sex and violence, while The Last Days of Dogtown is as plain as a charcoal sketch. Basing this novel loosely in fact- she discovered the existence of the town by reading a pamphlet- Diamant adeptly manages to evoke the minutae of everyday living in an all but forgotten place and time in history.

In The Last Days of Dogtown, Diamant creates a gripping historical novel as she delves into a lost crevice of human drama in 19th-century Massachusetts and presents it with a modern tone. The novel ends with a sigh which some readers, accustomed to having everything tied up in a nice bow by television and movies, will find unsatisfying. She takes us alongside the drunkards, whores, and witches, and, in the end, she evokes the tragic sadness of humanity in the grays and pale sunshine of Cape Ann. This is a book worth reading.