I read this for our book club and I might not have finished it except for that. The author writes lyrically, just beautiful descriptions for 500 plus pages. But the plot....It's based on Hamlet and the author often forces events to make them fit the story of the play in this modern take. But while I can understand Claudius killing his brother because he wants to become king, here there's no real motivation for Claude to kill his brother, Gar - he doesn't particularly seem to care about the dogs or his wife or the farm, just they had disagreements as boys. So that's why he gets a deadly poison in Japan to come back and kill him months later? He had to kill him in Hamlet, but it just didn't make sense here. 
 There's endless pages of training and grooming dogs - I like dogs, but really? And why would someone pay so much money for these dogs in the fifties or sixties mid-west? And I'm not sure what the point was of the letters between Gar and the purebred dog breeder. 
 Other things are brought up, the dog Forte or the commune, that never seem to have a point. You feel that they must be important, but it's never explained why. Maybe if the book had been half the size, it might have been better. It seems to be one of those books that the critics loved but regular readers are scratching their heads, if you read the other reviews on Goodreads and Amazon.