Between Two Covers, What Makes a Good Life?

December 17th, 2025

In André Alexis’s novel Fifteen Dogs, a simple question sparks a profound literary experiment. What would happen if animals were given human intelligence? And more importantly, would that intelligence make them happier or more miserable?

That question is posed casually over drinks at a Toronto tavern by two Greek gods, Hermes and Apollo. The gods make a wager, Apollo betting that any animal granted human intelligence would be unhappier than humans themselves. Hermes counters that if even one creature dies happy, he wins. As Apollo notes, “The best lives sometimes end badly and the worst sometimes end well.” With that, the bet begins.

The animals chosen are fifteen dogs resting outside a veterinary clinic. From this divine intervention, Fifteen Dogs unfolds as a gripping meditation on consciousness, language, and the search for meaning. The dogs awaken to human-like awareness, but they do not become human. They remain dogs, driven by scent, sound, and pack instinct, now complicated by memory, abstraction, and the awareness of time.

As Dr. Teresa Carmody, Assistant Professor in UNO’s Writer’s Workshop, notes, one of the novel’s great pleasures lies in how fully Alexis honors both sides of that transformation. The dogs develop their own language. One, a mixed-breed named Prince, begins to write poetry, delighting some of the pack while enraging others. One dog searches for God. Another, a clever and manipulative beagle, uses his intelligence ruthlessly. Some resist their new consciousness altogether, longing to return to their former, instinct-driven lives.

Alexis does not present intelligence as a gift without cost. The novel explores how painful it can be to resist one’s evolving nature, or to deny the full scope of one’s own being. Each dog responds differently, raising questions that extend far beyond the animal world. What part of identity is intelligence? What part is instinct? What makes a life meaningful, and who gets to decide?

At its core, Fifteen Dogs is a philosophical novel driven by genuine narrative tension. Readers care deeply about what happens to these dogs, even as the book asks expansive questions about morality, happiness, creativity, and faith. It is a work that demonstrates what the novel does best, allowing readers to inhabit minds in transition, to feel consciousness expanding from the inside.

Published by Coach House Books and recently reissued in a 10th Anniversary Edition with a foreword by Eileen Myles, Fifteen Dogs has earned some of Canada’s highest literary honors, including the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and Canada Reads. André Alexis, born in Trinidad and raised in Canada, continues to be one of contemporary literature’s most thoughtful voices.

Wise, surprising, and deeply moving, Fifteen Dogs reminds us that literature still has the power to explore the biggest questions of existence. And fittingly, it is the dogs who show us why the written word remains essential.