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Cris Mazza's "Dog People"

© Robert Powers

Literary fiction has never been held in high esteem by major commercial publishers, although some of the old-time family houses (unfortunately now swallowed up by conglomerates whose main reason for being is the bottom line) have a distinguished past. For instance, Scribner's took a special interest in the writing of such newcomers as Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe. Editor Maxwell Perkins has been credited with shaping and shepherding these writers to their present status as major twentieth century icons.

Today, in many instances, it's the small publishers or the university presses that have taken up the cause of quality fiction. One such leader is the non-profit Coffee House Press in Minneapolis which, over the past few years has published a long list of excellent fiction.

The trend continues with Dog People, a quirky novel from the extremely talented Cris Mazza, an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Dog People ($13.95 in paperback) is her seventh work of fiction. The folks at Coffee House Press have labeled the novel "a union between The Truth About Cats and Dogs and Basic Instinct."

In her real life, Mazza has what she calls "an intense, obsessive hobby" of training and showing dogs. Although the new novel isn't set in the world of dog shows, its background of that element is an important factor.

Mazza gives the reader a quirky cast of characters: a lesbian dancer, a fascist dog trainer, and ineffectual interior designer and a love-starved caterer. But there's no dog show. As Mazza told a magazine interviewer, "The most important parts of the book involve what the people are doing to and with each other. And there's a lot of jealousy and ambition going on. Meanwhile, the dogs just want to have fun."

Mazza was born in southern California and her parents were friends to a number of celebrities. But they decided the high life wasn't proper for a youngster, so the family moved to San Diego. Mazza spent her childhood in a relatively rural atmosphere. A journalism major at San Diego State, she quickly knew that wasn't going to be her career, citing her dislike of interviewing people. Her thesis, a novel called How to Leave a Country won an award but didn't see publication until eight years later, in 1984, by Coffee House Press.

Mazza has been controversial because of the sexual content of much of her writing. When she edited a collection called Chick-Lit 2 last year, the book of unconventional avant-garde fiction that included stories by lesbian characters about lesbian characters. The book came out with a stamp inside the book cover denoting sponsorship by the embattled National Endowment for the Arts. Although Mazza calls the stamp "a mistake," a U.S. congressman called for an investigation.

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