Every year, The Morning News hosts one of the quirkiest competitions in the literary world. The Tournament of Books has brackets, like another famed March tradition. The preferred book out of two is determined by a judge, who often uses personal reasoning and feelings to make the determination.
The winner doesn't really get anything. There is the promise, or threat, of a rooster. Actually, it's a donation to the Heifer Project in the form of a rooster.
The object of the tournament for this reader is not to see which book wins. It's the passionate interest in championing books that have meant something to readers. It's the celebration every year that reading meaningful fiction in this crazy world matters. It's the exchange of ideas. It's the opportunity to find books not yet read, experience again why a book meant something to you as a reader and to be reinvigorated by the idea of getting lost in a good book.
In this year's tournament, it's been a delight to see several books I've written about in this space win their bracket. Even if one of them didn't win, though, to see an honest analysis of a book that I've enjoyed is a pleasure. It brings back memories of living in the book, and gives me a bit of hope others may discover the work because it is being discussed.
The top ones for me are:
The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li, in which two girls concoct an elaborate literary hoax, which has unintended consequences.
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel, in which a moment in time affects several characters across the years. The echoes of her earlier books are fascinating to see.
Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance by Alison Espach, in which a girl loses a beloved sister and yet this is not a gloomy novel.
Give the brackets a glance and see if there is a novel you've read or wondered about, and if there is one you'd like to see continue on.
Meanwhile, because of the site crash here last week, some readers didn’t see last week's column. Discussions were corrupted and curtailed because of the technical difficulties. And because I admire Elizabeth McKenzie's work so much, below is an expanded version of last week's column on her latest novel, The Dog of the North.
"It's just that somehow over the past few years I developed an aversion to people with sensible lives."
Nothing about Penny Rush's life has been sensible of late. Or for some time, come to think of it, in Elizabeth McKenzie’s The Dog of the North.
Currently, she has left her nondescript job as a dental office receptionist, left her cheating husband, and left her home. She's headed to her grandmother's Santa Barbara house because, well, Pincer is a handful. The elderly physician turns on people faster than the speed of light, going from friendly to threatening. The last time, she pointed what looked like a bazooka at someone.
Her longtime accountant, Burt, has hatched a plan with Penny that he will take Pincer out for the day while Penny and a team of professional cleaners go into the house, tackle the accumulated hoard and confiscate the weapon.
Everything goes wrong. Burt, a woebegone man who is extremely likeable, is severely ill and collapses when he goes to pick up their target. She springs into physician mode. Penny calls for an ambulance and Pincer goes with them. The cleaning ladies find filth, rats and a long-dead body. Burt has let Penny sleep in his van, which an ex named The Dog of the North. Strapped for cash, she's taken him up on it.
Burt's brother, Dale, comes into town because his older brother needs him. He rescues Burt's dog, Kweecoat (a mispronunciation of Quixote) from an inept dogsitter who has two other dogs that picked on the orange Pomeranian. (Because if the van had "dog" in its name there would be a real dog involved, too.)
Meanwhile, Penny's sister, who lives in Australia, has a rude real estate agent call her because it's about time they did something about their parents' house. They disappeared without a trace several years ago while on a trek in a rather inhospitable part of Australia. Penny cannot even. She misses her mother and stepfather (her sister's biological father) more than anything. Dealing with their house would mean they really are never coming back.
Penny's grandfather and Pincer's ex-husband, Arlo, also has plans for her. His current wife is calling, demanding Penny get Arlo settled in a home. Arlo, who is more than competent in his 90s, agrees with Penny that he might as well, because they've found an apartment in a retirement community that he finds agreeable. When he moves, his wife is angry even though she had been nagging for it. Arlo is more interested in going to Australia to trace the last known movements of his daughter and her husband. He wants Penny to go with him.
While all this sounds busy, Elizabeth McKenzie's novel keeps everything on track. Penny's life is chaotic, but her making sense of what's going on and dealing with things and people as they come up is a journey that helps her put everything into focus.
Many of the characters reveal themselves to be far more than one-dimensional as the story unfolds. Among them is Pincer. She is capable of stabbing Penny with a pin, but also of spending years helping Japanese survivors of the atomic bombs.
The reader also sees some of what went into her mother’s lifelong journey, and just how she and her husband could have gone wandering into parts of the Australian countryside that people without wanderlust would never have seen.
And there are some lovely moments with Arlo that show how in moments of quiet, the past can be laid to rest.
With overtones of McKenzie's earlier novel, The Portable Veblen, and echoes of Where'd You Go, Bernadette?, The Dog of the North is a compelling chronicle of how patterns can be found in chaos, how the past can inform the present, how the future can be something to look forward to when the past is acknowledged. There are outrageously nasty characters in the novel, but also some very, very lovely ones. And the latter are far more important to the story than the former.
As for living a sensible life? Penny sees many kinds of lives. She and the reader realize that what may be sensible for one is not for another, and that there is more than one way to do more than exist.
The Dog of the North is a quirky, wistful novel about quirky, wistful characters. What a ride.
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