Review by New York Times Review
"DOGTOWN: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town" is a true-crime story, an art appreciation course and an American history lesson stitched together, and it succeeds as all three, albeit with a few seams showing. It begins with a painting. In the early 1990s, Elyssa East was studying art history at Reed College when she chanced across a work called "Mountains in Stone, Dogtown" (1931), by the American artist Marsden Hartley. She quickly became obsessed with Hartley - "my imaginary friend and mentor" - and eventually determined to visit Dogtown, in Gloucester, Mass., to find the spot where "Mountains in Stone" was made. Considering the painting's central role, it's a shame the book doesn't reproduce it (I, for one, was unfamiliar with Hartley), but East is so earnest in her appreciation that I was willing to go with her into the Dogtown woods. In particular, she was looking for the one rock formation that could point her, "like an oracle," to the site of Hartley's painting. But she found much more. Dogtown turns out to be a colonial ruin and a 3,000-acre wood dense with eccentric townies, ghost stories and, tragically, the haunting memories of a real-life murder from 1984. The victim, a teacher named Anne Natti, was walking her puppy in the woods when she was attacked from behind, her skull crushed by a rock. Her murderer was Peter Hodgkins, a local dropout and dockworker bullied as a child because of his buck teeth and long legs, who grew up choking kittens, crashing his bike into moving cars and exposing himself to women before he killed Natti on sheer impulse. Hodgkins confessed, then attempted suicide three times (once in the courthouse bathroom) before his conviction. East deserves credit for bringing the case to light and for reporting it with deft, moving details, like the fact that Natti carried her puppy's leash in a plastic bag, which was found later near her body, or that during her hikes, Natti would leave a "woodland calling card," like a branch or a bunch of flowers, for a former roommate who had often visited Dogtown with her. The Natti story is easily the most interesting and dramatic element in the book, and East is at her best in its telling. Indeed, "Dogtown" would have been stronger had its art and history components been subordinate to the crime story. It's unfortunate that East seems to underestimate the emotional impact of the murder, both in her book and in reality. When a resident asks her if she feels comfortable going alone into the Dogtown woods, East writes: "There she was again: Anne Natti. Why could people not just let her be? One woman dies in some woods 20 years ago - many people around this town did not even know her - but people still talk about it. Why is that? It would have been a fair enough question to ask, but I was at a complete loss for words." EAST is an excellent researcher, and "Dogtown," her first book, is full of interesting facts about New England history and native poets like Charles Olson. But research, however interesting, has to serve a narrative, not drag it down, and the book would have benefited from trims to the information about the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Management, Gloucester City Council politics and eminent domain issues relating to the city's water supply, among other things. Still, plaudits to East for exploring the relationship of the land to artists, as well as to the people who live upon it, in this case for generations. Ultimately, "Dogtown" is an ambitious and worthy book, and the whole ends up being greater than the sum of its parts. Lisa Scottoline's latest book is "Why My Third Husband Will Be a Dog: The Amazing Adventures of an Ordinary Woman."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 20, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
Adjacent to the seaport of Gloucester, Massachusetts, lies a forested tract of several square miles known as Dogtown. Initially drawn to the area by her interest in modernist painter Marsden Hartley, who depicted landscapes of Dogtown in the 1930s, East discovered that stories about the place extend back to colonial times. In lissome prose, East creates a remarkable depiction of the town that flexibly mixes history, character sketches, and personal observations. Everything East encounters in and about Dogtown seems to warn against, if not repel, human presence; a feeling of intruding upon a haunted place infuses her description of it. Ruins jut from Dogtown's undergrowth erratic boulders abandoned by the Ice Age, the wreck of a settlement, modern-day trash, and the scene of a 1984 murder. That's when a local eccentric bludgeoned a woman to death. That in the backgrounds of both murderer and victim there were starkly contrasting attractions to the woods of Dogtown provokes East's most acute insights into what the area means to people. An artfully wrought, absorbing debut.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2009 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This is a work of narrative nonfiction in which I attempt to tell the story of a landscape-Gloucester, Massachusetts's Dogtown." The author's succinct description of her fascinating, richly detailed and remarkably evocative exploration of a long-deserted colonial village amid a 3,600-acre woodland doesn't do justice to the quirky originality of Dogtown. Part history of a most unusual region; part commentary on the art of the American Modernist painter Marsden Hartley; part murder mystery/true crime police procedural; and part memoir, East's first book is likely to appeal to a varied audience for whom "Dogtown," Mass., is utterly unknown. East was initially drawn to Dogtown through the landscape paintings of Hartley-a gifted and undervalued contemporary of Georgia O'Keeffe, Arthur Dove and John Marin. Led to investigate the landscape Hartley painted, East soon finds herself, like the protagonist of a mystery, ever more deeply involved with the colonial ruin-is it a place of mystical wonder, or is it an accursed landscape? In colonial times, Dogtown was a marginal area of Gloucester said to be a "haven" for former slaves, prostitutes and witches; in the 20th century, it was largely abandoned and became a sort of uncharted place where, in a notorious 1984 incident, a mentally deranged sex offender murdered a young woman teacher in the woods. East is thorough in her descriptions of the attractive young victim and the loathsome murderer-a devastating portrait of the type of predator of whom it's said "he would never hurt anyone." Though the true crime chapters-which alternate with chapters presenting the tangled history of Dogtown-are inevitably more interesting, East gracefully integrates her various themes into a coherent and mesmerizing whole. In her admiration for Hartley, East kindles in the reader a wish to see his works, as well as the allegedly "mystical" landscape that inspired them; it would have been a good idea to include color plates of some of Hartley's work, juxtaposed with the landscapes. Also, the true crime chapters-written with appalled compassion-and the detailed portraits of individuals involved-the murderer, the victim, the victim's husband and his family, several police officers-would benefit from photographs as well. Late in Dogtown, as if the author's inventiveness were flagging and her material running thin, there are digressions into local politics that will be of limited interest. Dogtown is surprisingly spare in personal information. We learn only a few facts about the engaging young writer whose life was so changed when she first saw Hartley's paintings that, five years later, she was led to the adventure of Dogtown, which would involve her for 10 years. This is most unusually self-effacing, particularly in our rabidly confessional times. Some readers will appreciate the author's vanishing into her subject, which is certainly strong enough to stand alone, while others might feel an absence in this evocation of, as Hartley described it, "one of these strange wild places... where the chemistry of the universe is too busy realizing itself." Joyce Carol Oates's latest novel is Little Bird of Heaven (HarperCollins/Ecco). (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
New England regional magazine writer East traces the multifaceted history of the 3,600-acre wooded area in Gloucester, Mass., known as Dogtown. In June 1984, Gloucester resident Anne Natti was beaten to death while walking her dog, her body found stripped naked in the Dogtown woods. That gruesome event, and the arrest and trial of Natti's killer, provide a narrative center for East's wide-ranging history. The author was first inspired to investigate Dogtown after she was moved by 1930s-era paintings of the area by the modernist artist Marsden Hartley, whose own story she sprinkles throughout the narrative. She also skillfully folds in stories of pirates who attacked Gloucester ships in the early 1700s; the modernist poet Charles Olson, who lived in Gloucester and wrote many poems about Dogtown, starting in the 1950s; and hallucinations of ghostly apparitions in 1692. These rich, lyrically told stories, which span 400 years of local history, paint a portrait of Dogtown as an enigmatic, mysterious town. East is a skilled writer, adept at setting a mood, and her research about Dogtown and its environs is thorough. However, there are some sections that would have benefitted from a lighter touch or tighter editing. In one particularly labored sequence, East writes about Gloucester's annual St. Peter's festival, heavy handedly comparing Natti's murderer to St. Peter himself. The author also has a tendency to overdramatize certain scenes, as when she describes nightfall: "Blackness was seeping into the woods like freshly drawn India ink, bleeding from the outlines of things to pool at my feet." Not without its flawsit's the author's debutbut a satisfying, worthwhile portrait of Dogtown's historical wilderness. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
