SOURCE: Hughes, Kathryn. “Sweet-Sour.” New Statesman and Society 4, no. 159 (12 July 1991): 37-8.

In the following review, Hughes argues that Hagedorn fails to clearly define the variety of narrative voices in Dogeaters.

Two novels from the US set out to chart a new place in the literary landscape: South East Asia during the middle decades of this century. Dogeaters is set in a Manila ground down by dictatorship—sweet, steamy and so rotten that even the fiercest rain cannot sluice it clean. Such is the social interleaving of the place that there is no need for a clumsy narrative device to bring Generals, street boys and dreamy Catholic girls into the same story. Instead, they are bound together by a series of desires, cynically manipulated by a corrupt regime, which work to enthrall at every level of society.

There is sex, for instance, a commodity for sale in the smartest...