The Oldest Bitch Alive

Day explores the nature of parasitic and symbiotic relationships in her wondrous debut, which largely follows the deterioration of a couple’s beloved French bulldog. Gelsomina takes a turn after she drinks from the “murky backyard lake” in rural Virginia, where her owners, John and Wendy, retreated from New York City years earlier, when she was a puppy. Two worms enter her system, causing her to lose interest in food, and she registers the worms’ “desire to take what is not their own” as a “violat[ing] her beliefs of right and wrong.” The couple, an architect and a designer, chose their glass house, which “sits like a trinket on a peninsula surrounded by pine trees,” out of their mutual love for minimalism, born out of a “desire for control,” and Gelsomina’s presence there completes their pastoral ideal, “like a painting that was meant to frame a lounging woman but instead featured a French Bulldog.” As Gelsomina founders, she observes the couple’s love for each other and, given that her own instinct for mating was “written out of her body at a young age,” she “seeks to learn from the worms how to love.” Day’s arch depictions of Gelsomina’s owners contrast poignantly with the dog’s earnest and searching reflections. This unique novel invites the reader to see the world anew. Agent: Zoe-Aline Howard, Howland Literary. (Mar.)