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The dog of the north : a novel von Elizabeth McKenzie
First is Penny, somewhere on the spectrum, finding social situations awkward but also has experienced situations where animals have talked to her, specifically a fish. This was as she floated out to see when she rescued a 'grunion' who turned out to be a 'false grunion' but who she felt was a friend that she could talk to. Fortunately, she was rescued by a ship.
There is Burt Lampey, her grandmother's accountant who wears a toupee that he eventually ditches and gives to his dog to make a nest in. He is very ill but provides Penny with a campervan to stay in whilst she is visiting him and her grandmother. He sees himself as a ladies man and lives in his office. His dog is called Kweecoats although on his collar tag it says Quixote.
Her grandmother must be the most peculiar with dead bodies in the shed and other places around her house. A house so filthy that the cleaning agency who are called in to clean it whilst she is in hospital find 29 dead rats but can't find the gun that she brandished at the meals-on-wheels people. She is Dr Pincer and has a little dementia which can show itself in furious criticising of people and then completely forgetting it happened. I wonder how many grandmothers have stabbed their granddaughters in the leg with a brooch that had rat or mouse pee on it?
The story is told from Penny's point of view, where she has left her job, her soon to be ex-hsband and answered a call to come and help her grandmother but ends up having adventures with travel to try and find her missing parents along with Arlo her grandfather (divorced from Pincer but remarried). There are meals with other people, experiments, visiting family, people becoming ill or arrested whilst Penny works out some of her childhood trauma. She does not fit in but McKenzie shows us that we are all a bit flawed - what is normal, after all?
As this is a quest story with very few wise people to help Penny on her way, it is remarkable that at the end she finds her way through the chaos to hope with family and love and healing the outcome.
I imagine that this book is named after The Dog of the South by Ray Midge. I haven't read it but it is said to be an eventful trip to South America to retrieve his stolen Ford Torino and possibly win his wife back again. There are definite parallels between the books.
This is a funny book with Penny's interior world guiding us through.
Our protagonist, thirty-five-year-old Penny Rush, has a lot on her plate. Her marriage recently fell apart and she is currently unemployed and strapped for cash, but she doesn’t have the time to brood over all of this, given that she has to attend to an issue concerning her grandmother, Dr. Pincer, whose living situation has fallen under the radar of Adult Protective Services. Penny is on her way to her grandmother's house in Santa Barbara, to get it cleaned (Pincer hoards more than rats and jars of weird specimens on her property and won’t make it easy for Penny), with help of her grandmother’s accountant, Burt Lampey with whom she strikes up an easy friendship. But things do not go as planned and what follows is a sequence of (mis)adventures that has Penny jumping from one crisis to another. We follow her as she deals with the situation with her grandmother, finds herself responsible for Burt’s adorable Pomeranian, Kweecoats (a mispronounced version of “Quixote''), embarks on a road trip in Burt’s green van named “Dog of the North” with a donkey-shaped piñata and a weird weapon-like instrument, the “scintillator”, she had to confiscate from her grandmother, travels to Australia with her grandfather Arlo whose second wife would rather have him in a senior care facility than at home, navigates her complicated relationship with her biological father and fights her attraction to Dale, Burt’s attractive younger brother who might be married. At the center of Penny’s troubles is her own family trauma - the disappearance of her mother and stepfather while on a trip in the Australian Outback five years ago. They had emigrated to Australia years ago and Penny’s sister, Margaret is also settled in Australia with her family. Penny has to come to terms with the fact that they are truly gone.
The Dog of the North by Elizabeth Mckenzie is an engaging story full of heart and humor. There is a lot to unpack in this novel. The author touches upon themes of elder care, family trauma, friendship, loss and healing in this quirky and thoroughly entertaining read. However, I would have liked the road trip segment to have been longer because that was what I was expecting. Despite the occasional farfetchedness, this story is one that held my attention. Penny suffers from low self-worth and on occasion, her choices are foolhardy and her decisions are questionable – but her flaws make her real and ultimately she is a character you can sympathize with and root for. As the narrative progresses, we see that the borderline ridiculous situations and people Penny encounter prompts her to pause and reflect on her own life amid all the madness happening all around her. At the heart of this novel is Penny’s journey - emotional and cathartic- that will help Penny reevaluate her own life and priorities. I liked that the author ends the story on a hopeful note instead of making it too neat and thereby, unconvincing. I will say, however, that to fully enjoy this novel, would require the reader to not overthink it and to just go with the flow.
This is my first Elizabeth McKenzie novel and I can’t wait to read more of her work. I paired my reading with the audio narration by Katherine Littrell which enhanced my experience.
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Both Veblen and Paul have odd families and their relationship is strange. Sadly, I wasn't invested in any of the characters. A bit bizarre for me.
It's hard to review a book I enjoyed so thoroughly. It's an oddball book, to be sure. Any description of the plot is either gives too much away or is inscrutably cryptic. There's a hostile Grandmother who is both a scientist and a hoarder, with an uncertain number of literal skeletons hidden away. There's an accountant undergoing a health emergency who may or may not share a toupee with his younger brother. There are parents long lost in the Australian outback and a dog named Kweecoats, for absolutely the most convoluted reason. There's an old van that is conveniently furnished with a futon and less conveniently furnished with a tire and a bike. And through all the chaos, Penny, our protagonist does her best. She's a mess, but she's also resilient and determined to find her way and help her family.
I hesitate to call this book charming, because I will absolutely not pick up a book anyone calls charming, thank you very much. Penny has such a wonderfully weird take on life, a life in which she has been beat up pretty thoroughly, that gives her a determined kind of optimism and to make friends out of people very different from herself. I loved this book, was entirely immersed in every strange thing life threw at Penny, and will be automatically reading whatever McKenzie writes next.
One line on the cover should have told me that my expectations might be a little off. The one that says Shortlisted For The Women's Prize For Fiction. The Women's Prize For Fiction normally goes to quite literary books. The 2022 winner was Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness. The 2021 winner was Susanna Clarke's Piranesi. It's not the kind of prize a Redemption By Roadtrip novel is likely to win unless it goes way off-piste.
By the way, the publisher seems to have gotten ahead of itself with that statement. The Dog Of The North is on the Women's Prize For Fiction Longlist but the Shortlist won't be announced until 28th April, more than a month from now.
Anyway, it turns out that The Dog Of The North was... well... odd. Cleverly, nicely, engagingly, sometimes humorously odd but always, and ultimately disturbingly, odd.
The oddness starts with the main character and is compounded by how she tells her story. Penny Rush is a woman in her thirties who has been so deeply damaged by her childhood and her marriage that she's reached a point where she is unsure of her right to be anywhere. She struggles with the most humdrum human interactions. Her first instinct is to be as invisible as possible and, when that's not possible, to apologise for her own existence. Penny is confused and she has difficulty being honest with herself about how she feels and what she wants. As Penny is the one telling the story, it shouldn't be surprising that I was also confused as I read the story.
I was halfway through the book and still had no idea where the story was going. The narrative felt like a long fall down a rabbit hole. I could see that this 'falling forward' mirrored Penny's mental state. She has difficulty having confidence in her own worth, bordering on uncertainty about her right to be anywhere. She is unmoored from her past life and coping with the chaos of her grandparents' lives while trying to find a place and a person to be. Her grandmother is a domineering, aggressive, accomplished woman who lives partly in a fantasy world, suffers from paranoia and mood swings and has a life-long habit of using the people around her to get her own way. Her grandfather is in a failing marriage to a much younger woman and is starting to suffer from cognitive decline. Penny, who puts a lot of energy into avoiding confronting her own problems, somehow ends up taking responsibility for solving her grandparents' problems. The result, of course, is chaos.
The publishers described this book as 'darkly comic'. I think that means it will make you laugh but you'll feel guilty about it afterwards.
This book didn't make me laugh. Not once. I don't think that's what it was trying to do. This is a story about a woman who is so starved of affection and so unused to human connection that she becomes inappropriately emotionally attached to anyone who shows her kindness. The man who first shows her kindness also has issues. He's divorced, off his depression meds, living out of his van and in danger of losing his law practice. This makes for some bizarre scenes but I didn't find any of them funny.
I hadn't realised it as I was reading but I'd become emotionally detached as I listened to Penny's account of a series of increasingly bizarre mishaps. This was partly because she told her story in a way that made light of her anxiety and her problems with her self-worth so that this story felt like a comedy where the humour was falling flat. Then, in the final section of the book, I was given a flashback to Penny's childhood that took me from detachment to anger in seconds. I was listening to a pompous, ludicrously over-confident paediatrician mangling a psychiatric assessment with ten-year-old Penny and suddenly I was truly angry. I wanted to strangle him for the damage he was doing.
So, now I was engaged and ready for the big finish. It didn't happen. Perhaps I was only expecting it to happen because I still hadn't let go of my Redemption By Roadtrip expectations and was looking for Penny's route to her Happy-Ever-After. What actually happened was more subtle, probably more truthful but sadly much less satisfying. Penny didn't have an epiphany. She didn't solve all her problems in a single step by attaching herself to new people She didn't suddenly become strong and fulfilled and self-confident. BUT she did start to like herself a little more and to find ways of saying what she wanted and what she didn't want and to feel entitled to prioritise her own needs.
As I said, it's an odd book. In this case, odd isn't bad but it does make the reader work harder to understand what they're reading.
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Perednia | 9 weitere Rezensionen | Mar 11, 2023 |
Perednia | 9 weitere Rezensionen | Mar 11, 2023 | Veblen (named after the iconoclastic economist Thorstein Veblen, who coined the term “conspicuous consumption”) is one of the most refreshing heroines in recent fiction. Not quite liberated from the burdens of her hypochondriac, narcissistic mother and her institutionalized father, Veblen is an amateur translator and “freelance self”; in other words, she’s adrift. Meanwhile, Paul—the product of good hippies who were bad parents—finds his ambition soaring. His medical research has led to the development of a device to help minimize battlefield brain trauma—an invention that gets him swept up in a high-stakes deal with the Department of Defense, a Bizarro World that McKenzie satirizes with granular specificity.
As Paul is swept up by the promise of fame and fortune, Veblen heroically keeps the peace between all the damaged parties involved in their upcoming wedding, until she finds herself falling for someone—or something—else. Throughout, Elizabeth McKenzie asks: Where do our families end and we begin? How do we stay true to our ideals? And what is that squirrel really thinking? Replete with deadpan photos and sly appendices, The Portable Veblen is at once an honest inquiry into what we look for in love and an electrifying reading experience.
I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.
My Review: A debut novel that, for its subject, takes on greed, Othering, and intergenerational family toxicity. While Author McKenzie published stories before this book appeared in 2016, the appearance of the novel was warbled delightedly about by Jeff VanderMeer, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Karen Joy Fowler. Reviews from the New York, and Los Angeles, and Seattle Timeses, the Boston Globe, Library Journal and Kirkus and NPR...several programs!...was longlisted for a National Book Award...you get the idea, it was down as The Next Big Deal.
But I forgot it existed. I read it in the dark year, and I came up dry on things to say about it.
In having a clear-out, I found the ARC again. It's such a strange title that I remembered it straight away. How many people in 2022 recall who Thorstein Veblen was? Not a lot more, or fewer honestly, than did in 2016. It's an odd and slightly off-putting thing to first-name your main character. It does efficiently Other her from the get-go. I wasn't sure that I liked that. I remember thinking that it was a darn good thing that she was the sort of person who could, in all seriousness, ask “Do you think wishful thinking is a psychiatric condition?”
So why did I resurrect this long-ago gift from a publisher who clearly never thought to hear from me about it again? Because, in flipping through it, I was caught by some unusually persuasive turns of phrase:
She had once concluded everyone on earth was a servant to the previous generation—born from the body’s factory for entertainment and use. A life could be spent like an apology—to prove you had been worth it.
–and–
Veblen espoused the Veblenian opinion that wanting a big house full of cheaply produced versions of so-called luxury items was the greatest soul-sucking trap of modern civilization, and that these copycat mansions away from the heart and soul of a city had ensnared their overmortgaged owners—yes, trapped and relocated them like pests.
–and–
The sharing of simple meals and discussing the day's events, of waking up together with plans for the future, things that feel practically bacchanalian when you're used to being on your own.
This is a writer speaking her truth. I love finding these moments. I think I left the book by the wayside because I couldn't, in the dark year, process the anticapitalist message as anything but the confirmation bias of my brain. In the decades of being steadily more and more radicalized by capitalism's failures of me, my chosen people, and the world my descendants will live in, I've resharpened that mental blade many times. This time I felt Author McKenzie's edge slash closer to me than before.
Author McKenzie reserves her loudest klaxon, her angriest blast of Gabriel's horn, for we-the-consumers. The sneaky message under Veblen's dithering disconnectedness is there. It's not unique, nor even original, but it's heartfelt and it's eloquent...and she's correct:
“I pledge allegiance, to the marketplace,
of the United States of America. TM.
And to the conglomerates, for which we shill,
one nation under Exxon-Mobile/Halliburton/Boeing/Walmart,
nonrefundable,
with litter and junk mail for all!”
Awomen.
Last 150 pages flew by--story really picks up there.
The other characters that make up the cast of the novel were far more interesting without feeling fabricated. Let's get some novels dedicated to them, or the Vreeland family, or Melanie and Linus. Those could feel a bit more authentic.
At one of her temp jobs, as a secretary at a hospital, she meets Paul Vreeland, a research physician who develops a medical device of great use to the military. He was raised by eccentric and somewhat hippy-ish parents, and constantly lives in the shadow of his mentally-challenged older brother. He leaves his hospital job to work with a government contractor to test and manufacture the device - which promises to make him famous and wealthy.
He and Veblen have a quick courtship, and decide to marry. When he moves into Veblen's home, he discovers that there are squirrels all around her neighborhood, and one in particular that seems to have taken up residence in the attic. Veblen has a soft spot for the squirrel, and takes some hilarious steps to keep Paul from catching it in the trap he eventually buys. She talks to it, and imagines that it talks back to her. It's one of these squirrel conversations that becomes the catalyst for a climactic shift in everyone's lives.
Paul's upbringing and subsequent desire for life's comforts is constantly at odds with Veblen's desire for a DIY lifestyle. This is just one source of conflict between characters in the novel. All of the characters are complicated, and just trying to do the best that they can. There is a fairly substantial plot, but also a lot of interior monologue and character growth. Overall, a really emotional, philosophical, and charming novel.
Desperately needed an escape from my Cormac McCarthy binge. Thought a talking squirrel might be just the ticket. (Partially worked, but not really my thing--neurotic family relations Thirty-somethings past time to move on from familial blame. Needed more input from the squirrel, IMHO.)
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