The Dog of the North caught my eye entirely because of its title. Was this a Jack London-ish adventure novel in the Yukon? Or was this slang for something entirely different?
In fact, the title turns out to be the nickname for a battered old minivan wherein the protagonist ends up sleeping and essentially living for significant parts of this book.
This novel is a wild ride. Penny Rush has just left her husband in Santa Cruz, California, and is headed down from Salinas to Santa Barbara to see her grandfather. She is broke and jobless. Her grandmother, Dr Pincer, is separated from her grandfather, and is suffering from some sort of dementia. Penny’s parents have been missing for five years.
My parents had already taken the step of vacating the northern hemisphere. They were creating a new life for themselves in Australia ostensibly because they liked the climate and the geomorphology, enjoyed the adventure, and got good returns on the exchange rate. But it’s also possible to say that they went to denounce the American Dream and avoid the various unpleasant people who had damaged their lives. We, my sister and I, had taken their emigration in stride. In fact, my sister had joined them. But then they had to take it a step further and vanish altogether.
And this is just the start of the book! Once in Santa Barbara, Penny meets Burt, her grandmother’s accountant, who wears an obvious toupee and turns out to be sleeping behind his office desk. He offers her his office couch. She also meets the Dog of the North.
“All I got at the end of the marriage.” [says Burt]
[…] He said his ex had named it in honor of a beloved novel with a similar name. Literary references aside, he said, the name combined two of his favorites, trips north and dogs.
Crisis follows crisis. Penny’s grandmother has recently threatened the Meals on Wheels delivery person, which has led to a police complaint, which has led to Adult Protective Services. Burt is rushed to the hospital with a stomach hemorrhage. Penny inherits his dog, Kweecoats (a mispronunciation of ‘Quixote’) and the eponymous van, which is lucky because she has no other place to sleep and no money. A road trip to Texas happens, where Penny meets and is attracted to Dale, Burt’s brother. Her own problematic father turns up, much to everyone’s dismay. There is emotional trauma at every level.
This is an enormous set of events to throw into a single book, but the author manages to make it work with humour and empathy. Penny is an engaging protagonist who is emotionally traumatized by her childhood, let alone recent events, and makes choices that the reader wishes she wouldn’t. Yet, these choices come out of kindness and caring, and she has an appealing determination in the face of all adversity. There are several threatening figures, such as her grandfather’s second wife Doris, and another tenant in Burt’s office building, but I found these people almost as funny or pathetic as they are scary.
In the latter third of the book, Penny ends up in Australia with her grandfather, and while it is interesting to meet Penny’s quite respectable and staid sister, so different from herself, it almost seemed as though the author had run out of catastrophes in the American southwest and had to move the action to Australia in order to expose Penny to a whole new set of potential dangers. Snakes! Dehydration! Broken-down rental cars in the Australian desert! Sinkholes! I ran out of emotional energy as well.
The ending is rather abrupt and inconclusive, as if the author was simply exhausted. And who can blame her?
This novel is a fun read for those who enjoy black humour and don’t get too emotionally invested in the crises.
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