The Dog Walker

by Leslie Schnur
Atria Books 2004

Selection method: Went looking for the worst book title I could find. Instead got the worst author’s name I could find. Schnur is a Pokemon character. Schnur! Schnur!
First: Nina Shepard was in love with a man she’d never met.
Worst: It was funny how she could know more about a man she’d never met than all the men she had met put together.
Most profound: After thirty-five years, she liked her legs.
Misspelled word used to describe Lenny Kravitz on page two: white-bread

Leslie Schnur likes hyphens. She wants you to know. She uses them to construct witty-and-familiar-but-not-that-familiar-and-not-that-witty adjectives. They’re easy to spot, like a curly black pubic hair in a bowl of warm cream. And good thing because I was not going to read more than three pages of this shitty book. Here is a selection, which I swear I didn’t make up:

  • soon-to-be-ex
  • way-too-long life
  • only-in-New-York sight
  • lovely-to-look-at alt-lifestyle junkie
  • irony-is-dead-or-not-dead argument
  • cinematographer-libertarian-vegetarian-qigong-expert ex-husband
  • real-life-adventure-tragedy-on-Everest-in-Antarctica-in-Krakatoa-with-sharks-with-fire stuff

She also desperately wants you to know about her dog. He is the best dog in the world, and his name is Charlie and he is a mutt from the ASPCA and he apparently is great enough to be listed in her dedication right next to her flesh and blood children. Thanks, mom. Happy to know we’re as important to you as a dog from the pound.

It is also important to know that Leslie Schnur has been an editor and publisher for over twenty years, and this is her first novel. In writing this wonderful piece of shit, she gives us further evidence that editors don’t know how to read. How could she even approve her own work? Cosmopolitan Magazine wouldn’t print this. Fake Chinese Teen Cosmo wouldn’t print this. And the label “chick lit” is too high a compliment, as it implies “literature” which this is not. I suggest instead the term “curdled festering placental tread marks on society’s sweaty undergarments” (which I think was also a song by Carcass).

This is a New Yorker clearly infatuated with her life and her city, which she thinks are crazy and vibrant, respectively, but which in fact are both alcohol dumpsters. I’m not saying Leslie Schnur is an alcoholic, just that there were a lot of wine stains on the cover and I got contact drunk while holding it.

The offending publisher here is Atria Books, which is where Simon & Shuster flushes everything not good enough for their flagship imprint. We last met Atria Books in Jennifer Weiner’s unputdownable (no hyphens necessary) Goodnight Nobody. We are far from surprised, then, that Jennifer Weiner lends the first puff quote to the back cover — the shitty pot calling the kettle shitty. But no less than the esteemed US Senator from Minnesota, Al Franken, also claims to like this book (he’s lost his mind, and my vote….when I get my illegal absentee ballot from Minnesota). I’m looking into whether Atria Books is really a business front for a meth lab.

I would like to round up every person who read this all the way through (start with her own list of acknowledgments), put them into a rocket ship, launch them into space, and drop them all on the Moon. Then blow up the Moon, impeach Al Franken, blow up Minnesota, and finally mix the Moon debris and Minnesota debris into a giant ball and make a new Moon. Then fire this second Moon directly into the Sun using futuristic ion rockets. Then burn the factory that made the rockets and have a party.

Other reviews: The Romance Reader, Trashionista, Curled Up, The Best Reviews

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2 thoughts on “The Dog Walker

  1. If transliterated into Cyrillic, “schnur” becomes an actual word: “шнур” means “cord” in Russian.

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