Night Dogs by Kent Anderson

First published in 1996

Kent Anderson was a Special Forces sergeant during the Vietnam War, an experience that informed his first novel, Sympathy for the Devil.  When he returned to civilian life, he took a job as a police officer.  That experience is reflected his second book, Night Dogs.  The novel tracks a short period in the life of a Vietnam veteran who works as a police officer in the North Precinct of Portland, Oregon.

I am not usually a fan of books about police officers, as they tend to be simplistic: they either glorify the job and make the officers appear more heroic than they generally are in real life, or they demonize all cops, painting them as corrupt or (at best) incompetent. I was therefore surprised by how much I enjoyed Anderson's novel. It isn't a thriller, isn't a conventional police novel with a well-structured plot that results in the cop catching the bad guy. Instead, the novel tells the story of a life--the life of a badly damaged man (damaged in large part by his service in the Special Forces) who happens to be a cop, a profession that gives him the opportunity to vent his anger and to unleash his violent impulses. Far from portraying the cop as a superhero, Anderson created a character who is capable of being a jerk, a racist, an ego-driven maniac, as well as a compassionate, funny, sensible human being. It is that complexity, that refusal to stereotype, that makes the character so interesting.

The story meanders from incident to incident, but Night Dogs is less about what the cop does than how he manages to live with himself--and how, in the end, he will deal with his pain-filled life. The writing is sharp, vivid, intense, and incredibly powerful. The story is sometimes tragic, often darkly funny, and always brutally honest. This is one heck of a good novel.

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