[In the following review, Brown views Recital of the Dog as an allegory about crime and punishment.]

In the introduction to the first publication of his award-winning plays, The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel and Sticks and Bones, David Rabe remarked that earlier in his life he wrote both plays and novels and that he was “not dedicated to any one form.” But upon receiving a Rockefeller grant in playwriting not long after he returned from the Vietnam War, Rabe's thought, as he recalled it, was, “I'll dash off some plays real quick, then focus in on the novel. [Playwriting] seemed artificial beyond what was necessary … [and] if things had turned out differently, I don't know if I would have written what I have in the way I have, but the grant was a playwriting grant.”

So it was plays that Rabe wrote. Then it was scripts, for the films Casualties of War, his own Streamers and, most recently, the adaptation of John Grisham's popular novel The Firm. And now, some 20 years after receiving that Rockefeller grant, Rabe has written his first novel, Recital of the Dog.

It's a strange story, full of anger and violence, but not the sensational kind of violence. There is a larger purpose to Rabe's novel, as there is in his plays, where themes of powerlessness, rage and confusion also prevail.

Recital of the Dog is not a typical mainstream realistic novel, though it has a solid beginning, middle and end. We're taken on a journey of sorts into the psyche of a frustrated painter, and at times it's hard to tell what's imagined and what's not. At one moment the world around him seems real; in the next you feel as lost as the painter does. The trick is to read the story as an allegory about guilt, crime and punishment, where characters and events are more symbolic than literal.

With his wife and their 5-year-old son, Tobias, one of the few characters in the book who's referred to by name, the painter moves from the “mayhem of the city” to the tranquil pastures of country living. Here he hopes to rekindle his passion for his art, to focus, to understand. But this is a man who does not know himself, a man “afflicted by some terrible disease, a disorder in [his] nervous system,” who either never knew how to love or has forgotten somewhere along the line.

Warmth escapes him, both figuratively and literally, for throughout his journey he's physically cold, chilled to the bone. He's also estranged from his wife, distant from his child. Outside the violent, tumultuous world of his imagination, he has no identity. Moving to the country won't help him. In fact, it does just the opposite.

The event that propels the narrator-painter into the dark side of the human soul involves, at least on the surface, the killing of a dog. He is trying to paint the cows in his pasture, but the dog likes to bark and chase them. And so one day the painter gets fed up and shoots the dog.

The killing of an old mongrel doesn't seem catastrophic enough to merit the sort of guilt, paranoia and psychological turmoil that soon comes to haunt the narrator. On the other hand, given his state of mind before he fled to the country, that might be all it takes to push him over the edge.

The idea is certainly less absurd than, say, opening a story with a man who wakes up one morning to discover that he's been transformed into a giant beetle. You either accept the premise and read on, knowing full well that you're entering a very strange world, or you reject it and close the book. But that would be a mistake, with Kafka or Rabe.

The power of Rabe's story comes in the trials and tribulations that occur after the killing of the dog. It comes in the questions that he asks himself, and thus the reader—the sort of questions that have no easy answers, if there are any at all. And it comes in the observations of a man who is suddenly made aware of his own impotence.

The simple horrors of daily life—the senseless killings and acts of cruelty that are reported in the newspaper—intensify the narrator's “hallucinatory state,” and he withdraws into that private place some might consider insanity.

It is guilt, the great motivator, that propels him toward change. The opening pages of the novel concern the killing, and like Dostoevski's Crime and Punishment, where the crime takes place within the first 90 pages and the punishment occupies the next 400, the rest of Recital of the Dog revolves around the narrator's descent into a psychological hell, and, eventually, his redemption through recognition of his sins, which amount to more than the killing of the dog.

The dog's owner, known only as the Old Man, knows nothing of his pet's demise—he thinks it's been stolen—and the narrator is unwilling to confess his crime. But ultimately he must reckon with his guilt, his conscience, his violent hallucinations, and the “terrible disease” of his artistic and emotional paralysis.

As in Rabe's powerful Vietnam drama, Streamers, violence in its myriad forms and manifestations, the imagined and the real, is the theme of Recital of the Dog. But in the novel the drama often, perhaps too often, occurs inside the narrator's mind. And as Rabe portrays the narrator's hallucinations, his prose can become extremely lush, dense and heavy with metaphor:

Something's coming. … Something terrible and violent. Some devastation. … Continents rotate like titanic ball bearings in response to distant urging. I see them heaving toward each other in geological anxiety, huge slabs of earth and piles of rock bursting up from underground like dead-men from their graves. Seas are awash across my stomach, and I am convulsed from side to side. Africa is careening to collide with rumbling Eurasia. Lions roar. Apes and orangutans cling forlornly to their trees. The Alps, in all their angular intensity, rise up like snowmen on a teeter-totter.

But by and large the actions and speech of Rabe's characters do serve as anchors to the so-called real world that surrounds the less tangible one of the narrator's split-consciousness. And, no matter what the genre, David Rabe is a remarkable storyteller.