Even the Dogs by Jon McGregor
Published 2012 · 260 pages · 65,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is Even the Dogs to read?
Even the Dogs scores 55 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 42 out of 100
- McGregor writes in raw, direct prose that captures the speech patterns of addicts and homeless people. The language is visceral and unadorned, requiring no specialized vocabulary beyond understanding drug culture basics.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Run-on sentences and stream-of-consciousness passages create a relentless rhythm. Punctuation disappears at times, mimicking the blur of addiction. This can be initially disorienting but establishes its own momentum.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- The novel stays fiercely grounded in bodies, substances, and survival, but its spectral narration lifts it toward something metaphysical. Concrete suffering opens onto questions about witness and memory.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Multiple characters' stories overlap and interweave around the central death. McGregor gives each figure a history that emerges in fragments, requiring you to piece together lives from accumulated glimpses.
- Narrative indirection: 60 out of 100
- The collective ghostly narration watches without explaining. What happens and why must be inferred from action and memory. The novel shows devastation without editorializing.
- Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
- The dead man's apartment, the autopsy scenes, the ghostly witnesses—McGregor creates a symbolic framework that lifts documentary realism toward elegy. The title itself invokes compassion for the outcast.
- Ironic distance: 50 out of 100
- No irony here—McGregor writes with fierce compassion for his subjects. The novel's power comes from directness rather than distance, though it avoids sentimentality through unflinching observation.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- We know from the start that Robert is dead. The novel traces how he got there and what happens after, but offers no redemption narrative. Lives continue in their patterns without false hope.
- Structural complexity: 60 out of 100
- The spectral collective narration and non-linear time create genuine structural challenges. Multiple lives interweave around the central death, requiring attention to keep characters and timelines straight.
How Even the Dogs is regarded
Even the Dogs holds a literary regard score of 56 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.