Dog’s Life
Ellington Boulevard, Adam Langer, 2008
Apartment at 523 Ellington Blvd 
A cute tale of life in contemporary New York, particularly in Manhattan Valley, the upper West side between Central Park and Riverside Park at 106 St (now Ellington Boulevard). Deals with the lives of several interrelated people and one dog, named Herbie Mann. Herbie lives with Ike a black jazz clarinetist in an apartment building that he help rehabilitate in the eighties. For his help the landlord lets him stay in a nice apartment in the building for $350 a month for as long as he wants. No written agreement was ever drawn up.
Ike owns a priceless B-flat 19th Century Mueller clarinet. Ike has split from his funk band and is just returning from Chicago where he cared for his now deceased mother in her last months. He hasn’t played or written music for several years. The landlord dies and his lazy son, figuring the market is nearing its peak, starts selling all of daddy’s real estate including Ike’s apartment. Without a written agreement, Ike can’t do much.
George Washington Bridge from Riverside Park 
Enter the other characters, the buyer, whose father’s success as a jingle writer allows him to help his daughter buy the apartment for $650,000, and who has dropped out of graduate school to start her first job as assistant editor as a once prestigious journal, now in sad decline; her husband, for six years a PhD student and teaching assistant at Columbia who can’t get motivated to finish his boring dissertation; the turn around artist hired to save the journal who sets about firing everyone she can find but likes the buyer and promotes her to full editor; the investigative reporter who has been researching the fraudulent methods including phony subscriptions the turn around artist uses to “save” publications only to have them fail totally once she has moved on; the real estate broker who is a failed actor but successful real estate man; the Korean mortgage broker, a girl living in Fort Lee whose parent’s corner fruit stand is going bankrupt and who prays for continuing bad employment numbers so interest rates will stay low; the owner of a run down theater on the upper west side that is losing money and may need to be sold; the heiress who wrote and anonymously published a child’s fantasy novel as a young girl and who is currently studying writing at Columbia. The husband will fall in love with her and the wife will seek revenge by outing her as the author of the fantasy and then trashing it in a review.
Chapters are dedicated to advancing the story from the point of view of each character. Most interesting were the chapters from the point of view of the dog, Herbie, who Ike rescues from the dog pound when he hears Herbie’s perfect A-flat howl. Herbie has been dumped into the pound by one of the other characters in the novel and Herbie has a long memory.
Herbie does not fully sense the passage of time – to him, it seems to be almost all one moment of running and standing still, of swimming and dreaming, of happiness and despair. He is a puppy and he is growing old. Ike is here and he is not. Part of Herbie is still swimming toward Canada, part of him never escaped the shelter, part of him is still in Chicago, part of him is digging in front of a house in Croix-de-Mer, part of him has only just been born. He smells the present and the past – he smells the meadow and his mother’s breath, smells Chloe Linton’s perfume and Ike’s shirt, smells Lake Michigan, the grass in Central Park, and the steps at Stranger’s Gate the once led down to West 106th Street and now lead to Duke Ellington Boulevard.
St. Croix Island 