There is a particular kind of contemporary American novel that begins with competence and ends with disappearance. The protagonist has done everything correctly—built a marriage, maintained civility, become indispensable—and then wakes up one morning to discover that usefulness has replaced desire, and care has crowded out pleasure. A Dog in Georgia, Lauren Grodstein’s wry and searching new novel, understands this condition with unnerving clarity. Its great insight is that recovery rarely begins with therapy or confession. It begins with misdirection.
Amy Webb, once a chef and now something closer to an auxiliary life-force, does not initially travel to Georgia in search of herself. She travels in pursuit of a dog. Angel, a stray in Tbilisi famous for escorting neighborhood children to school, has vanished. Amy has watched him obsessively on YouTube—an intimacy without reciprocity, devotion without risk. When Angel goes missing, Amy volunteers to find him. The decision reads as altruism, though Grodstein is too perceptive a novelist to let altruism remain unexamined. Amy’s marriage is fraying. Her stepson has left for college. Her career has quietly evaporated. If she is no longer needed, who exactly is she?
Grodstein sends her heroine to Georgia with admirable restraint. Tbilisi is neither fantasy nor therapy spa. It is a city shaped by memory, contradiction, hospitality, and exhaustion—a place where politics surface through food, architecture, and the authority of grandmothers who have survived enough ideologies to distrust optimism. The novel’s Georgian women, especially its post-Soviet matriarchs, function as living archives. They feed, judge, tease, remember. They are not warm abstractions. They are sharp social instruments.
What A Dog in Georgia does particularly well—better than many novels preoccupied with reinvention—is refuse the language of reinvention altogether. Amy does not “find herself” so much as re-encounter her own appetite. Grodstein treats cooking as epistemology. To cook is to choose. To season is to assert preference. To eat is to participate in the world without apology. That Amy no longer cooks is not a quirky detail; it is the novel’s most damning diagnosis.
Angel, meanwhile, remains missing for much of the book, an absence around which meaning organizes itself. Grodstein resists turning the dog into a tidy metaphor. He is neither savior nor symbol. He is simply a creature whose quiet usefulness—walking children to school, asking for little—has made him beloved and disposable in equal measure. The novel’s interest lies less in whether Angel will be found than in what his disappearance permits Amy to notice: stray dogs without narratives, people without roles, desires without institutional permission.
There is, inevitably, a man—mysterious, attractive, unresolved. There is also a teenager whose rebellion carries more coherence than adult compromise. Grodstein handles these figures with discipline. They are not solutions. They are provocations. This is a novel suspicious of transformation arcs and allergic to slogans. Change here arrives through texture: a meal prepared, a street climbed, a question asked without immediately being answered.
For a Georgian reader—or anyone attentive to how places are used in contemporary fiction—the novel’s greatest virtue may be its refusal to instrumentalize Georgia as a spiritual backdrop. Grodstein writes the country as a lived social system, complete with economic pressures, political fatigue, and the irreducible dignity of daily ritual. The book listens more than it explains. It trusts that culture is absorbed through proximity, not annotation.
A Dog in Georgia is a winter book in the best sense: reflective without inertia, warm without sentimentality. It is a novel for readers who suspect that care has become compulsory, that self-erasure often masquerades as virtue, and that appetite—culinary, emotional, intellectual—remains one of the last reliable forms of truth.
By the end, the question is no longer whether Amy will return home changed. The more interesting question is whether she will ever again confuse disappearance with goodness. Grodstein does not answer this outright. She leaves us, instead, with the image of a woman relearning hunger in a city that understands survival as a communal art.
And somewhere nearby, a dog continues to walk.
Review by Ivan Nechaev
