Each of Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn’s published books—including Dangerous Music (1975), Pet Food and Tropical Apparitions (1981), and Dogeaters—represents an advance in sophistication and complexity of construction, with Dogeaters the culmination of a stylistic evolution originating in the poetry Hagedorn wrote as early as 1965 (a selection of which may be found in 1973’s Four Young Women Poets, edited by Kenneth Rexroth) and traceable in her one published play, Chiquita Banana (in 1972’s Third World Women, edited by Janice Mirikitani). The versatility verified by Hagedorn’s achievement in three genres, by her career as a performance artist in the dual art form poets’ band West Coast Gangster Choir, and by her practice of publishing poems in variant versions evidences her commitment to being comprehensive and eclectic.

As a result of the sudden shifts in narrative focus and the equally sudden transitions from one prose style to another, along with the formidable roster of names of people, products, and places, Dogeaters reads very slowly, compelling the reader to experience the societal stagnation that the novel graphically depicts. As a work of social realism (it is too direct to qualify as satire in any clear sense), it examines squalid societal phenomena such as “shower soapers” (who stimulate themselves and one another for the delectation of a paying homosexual, largely foreign, audience) in a manner reminiscent of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (c. 1349-1351). The cause of this repellent situation is the regime of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, though the connection between political repression and societal squalor is never directly made. The Marcoses are not named, but the First Lady has an edifice complex, a lust for shoes, and an inclination for foreign film directors—traits sufficient by themselves to identify the targets of the protest.

Hagedorn, however, avoids stridency and pamphleteering; the novel is carefully wrought in spite of its apparently miscellaneous contents. Different critics have reacted to the verbal texture of Dogeaters with comparisons to mathematical fractals, because of the seemingly endless series of overlapping shades, as well as to mosaic, to an epic ballad, to a collage, and to jazz. All these comparisons have merit. Critics disagree, however, about whether Hagedorn has achieved artistic coherence. Some think that the novel is overcrowded with characters, the characters lack development, the narrative lacks sequence and chronology, the novel’s materials are too disparate and not managed with sufficient adroitness, and the exoticisms (Filipino foods and locutions, for example) become wearing for the reader. Yet even if these doubts about coherence are accepted, it is possible, if the notion of imitative fallacy is laid aside, to argue that as a result Dogeaters is that much more a convincing rendering of a society in chaos. An examination of particulars in the text at least reveals a situation similar to that in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855-1892) or T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland (1922): Hagedorn has not sacrificed the craftsmanship of the individual passage to the texture of the whole work.

In the first chapter alone the reader discovers oxymoron (“the sky is a garish baby-blue”), metaphor (“she drives her dependable dark green Buick, the color of old money”), irony and alliteration (“the tormented face of Christ rendered in bloody, loving detail. Russet ringlets of horsehair hang from Christ’s bent head”), and synesthesia (“drab green smells”). The second chapter opens with a hypnotic and cumulative series of parallelisms that extends to the middle of the chapter’s second page:BECAUSE, they would say. Simply because. Because he tells the President what to do. Because he dances well. Because he tells the First Lady off. Because he dances well and...