Those gaps-the white abyss behind the dog roller coaster, the trees that grow out of bare-page nothingness-are where meaning resides. Go!, and the new reader fidgets in the gaps. Luke Luck takes licks in lakes duck likes”-the book rejects the very notion that everything to be found in a book can be found in that book. This is a careful subversion of the genre: rather than comfort the reader with the usual Seussian cocktail of alliterative, rhyme- and assonance-heavy words enumerating detail after detail-see, for example, Fox in Socks: “Duck takes licks in lakes Luke Luck likes. We depend on them because, along with the simple drawings they adorn, they’re all we have to find a story. Unlike those that populate the more verbose, rhymed learn-to-read stories like One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, the words in Go, Dog. It must be left to the reader to piece the world together. But also for more theoretical reasons-namely, that to capture reality precisely, the postmodern narrator must refuse to capture it fully. Eastman doesn’t explain, in part because he’s limited himself to only seventy-five different words, from the first dog to the final Good-by.

Who is this poodle? Who is this beagle? Why doesn’t he like her hats, until he does? And why does she care? Author and illustrator P. Go!, after the hordes of dogs have gone for the last time, the hat seems to be the only thing driving the meandering plot. The poodle wants the beagle to like her hat.

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