The Dog of the North - Elizabeth McKenzie Achieves Escape Velocity
Interview with the author of 2023’s best comic road trip
Penny Rush is a woman on a mission— if only she could get herself in gear. Her marriage is kaput, her grandmother in Santa Barbara has gone crackers, and her own parents have disappeared in the Australian outback, with all the leads gone cold.
Also, she’s broke.
So opens Dog of the North, Elizabeth McKenzie’s third novel: a road trip, a shaggy Pomeranian story, and the revelations of a woman who is neither entirely brave nor wise, but who can sometimes nail the truth like none other.
Last month, pouring Sherman’s dirty clothes into the washer, I discovered a slightly worn pink thong. “Yuck, what’s this?” I said.
“Oh. I found a bag of stuff at a bus top. Thought maybe you might like it.”
Repulsed, I held up the abbreviated scrap. “But the back part went up somebody else’s buttock crevice.”
“Can’t you just say ‘crack’ like everybody else?” Sherman said with disgust, peeling back yet another layer of his true feelings toward me.
“Sure. Whose crack was it anyway?”
Nothing but anguish would compel me to say a thing like that.
— The Dog of the North
I published McKenzie in our 2018 anthology Santa Cruz Noir, where we became friends and kibbutzed about what her next novel might be. I knew it would be something special!
This April I spoke to Elizabeth about her inspirations for Dog of the North, and how a comedy of aimless searching and scratching takes on its own existential wit.
SB: What are the qualities of your own road adventures, that you brought to your Penny’s time behind the wheel, and sleeping rough?
Did you ever get inspired by “road trip” novels, in addition to Charles Portis’s Dog of the South?
EM: As a kid I spent a lot of time in the backseat of our Buick Special driving all over the country. My parents had family in Texas and Ohio and thought nothing of taking off.
Later when we lived in Australia, we set out all over the place too. Then I was married to a long distance truck driver and we logged on the miles. —A lot of car trips to draw on.
Norwood is another great Portis novel on the road. And I loved the car scenes in Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life.
In Australia, there is the epic long-drive adventure that makes anything in the States look like a walk around the block.
In Australia, when you get way out, you need to be equipped with emergency gear. Like in the old days, when we had a “Desert Water Bag” strapped to the front of our Buick.
It’s surprising how many people do disappear in Australia’s hinterlands every year. When you’re out there you see a lot of wildlife, and a lot of dead wildlife. They call it “the tyranny of distance.”
I want to ask you about Dr. Pincer, Penny’s grandmother with the high IQ, intermittent dementia, and an iron will. She’s armed, hungry, and has god-knows-what buried in her backyard.
Crazy Old Coot characters made me laugh when I was young — it was impossible to imagine reaching that age.
Today, when I read Pincer, it seemed more like, “Maybe that’s future me!” —now that I’m closer to the septuagenarian school.
Pincer has been indomitable and scary her whole life. It’s not so much to do with age. Penny, for instance, will never turn into a Pincer. I really don’t think you’ll end up like Pincer, and I hope I don’t either!
“Here they are, Officer!” Pincer yelled from the front door. “They’re stealing me blind! They’re here to take everything I have. I’m not going anywhere, and nobody’s going to make me!”
“But we planned this together!” I called back.
Pincer slammed the door . . . Every few minutes I could hear her storming around inside, muttering to herself or some imagined foe. Though I knew Pincer eventually had fights with everybody, I had been shocked it had finally happened with me.
After about an hour Pincer cracked the front door. . . Her hair was sticking out in every direction, her eyes and nose red, her blouse untucked, her stretch pants atwist.
“What are you doing out here?” she said, in scratch whisper.
“Just thinking,” I said.
“What are we having for dinner?”
—The Dog of the North
You’re in your sixties too— what’s it like writing these older characters for you, that you might not have seen when you were youthful or even middle aged?
Great question. I notice it most when it comes to reading books I love.
Take Anna Karenina. When I was young I connected with Kitty. A little older, Anna. Now I feel for Dolly and understand her in a way I didn’t before.
A couple “Dog of the North” book reviewers (Times and Post) used the word “zany” as an affectionate or dispassionate descriptor of your title.
I flinched, thinking, “That’s a word used for women authors.” No man’s novel ever gets called ‘zany,’ no matter how eccentric. Think Wodehouse or Portis. On other hand, maybe zany is by definition feminine.
I got curious wondering about this so I looked up the etymology of zany. Doesn’t that seem like a Ray Midge thing to do? Maybe that’s who I am.
Anyway, it comes from a zanni, from a Venetian dialect for Johnny, and it referred to a stock character in theater, the jester character, the one who mocked the main character on stage.
I’ve reacted more to the word “quirky” which has been used as well. There’s an interesting essay about this by Madelin Newman, called “The Problem with Quirky.”
I don’t take issue with it so much from a feminist perspective; more from a perspective of lazy shorthand. The word is used a little too freely and doesn’t really say much.
Let’s talk about the specter of loved ones who disappear . . . in your story’s case, Penny’s parents. —The people who walk out the door for a drive and no one ever sees them again.
What does that do to a family, when there is no resolution? You handle it in the story with great gentleness.
Even when we do know how somebody has left us, we have unresolved issues.
I see this kind of disappearance as a metaphor for that. What a disappearance does leave you with, however, is a margin for magical thinking. There’s still hope despite all the evidence, that you may see the loved one again.
When you first told me you were writing The Dog of the North, I went into a Portisian The Dog of the South quotation-and-anecdotal frenzy, which probably took you by surprise! I told you that Portis’s 1979 novel was my absurdist touchstone.
You warned me then, your title is “Portis-adjacent,” not mimicry— and to manage my expectations. “But what about the monkey island?” I cried.
McKenzie’s demurrals notwithstanding, Penny’s tender goal to “achieve a conventional lifestyle” is hilarious.
I was looking over my notes recently from when I was writing the novel. I started calling it The Dog of the North about two months after I began. I’d felt a kinship in style with Portis, and when I realized I had a hulking vehicle in my story and a number of quixotic characters, the working title took hold.
I didn’t expect to use the name as the final title, but by then it really seemed to fit, Portis aside.
What are your impressions from your book tour road trip? What’s it like promoting a book these days?
When you have an event at Bookshop Santa Cruz or Book Passage, it blows your mind— a place where the store is really behind the book. It’s a magical and heartwarming experience.
But preparing for the release of a book, that’s something I was woefully naïve about! I didn’t know I’d have to talk about it so much, or make writerly remarks.
Here’s what Nabokov had to say about this:
“I’m not a dull speaker, I’m a bad speaker, I’m a wretched speaker. The tape of my unprepared speech differs from my written prose as much as the worm differs from the perfect insect—or, as I once put it, I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.”
What are you reading these days that surprised you a little? Please don’t say zany.
The most surprising and extraordinary novel I’ve read recently is coming out this fall. It’s called Same Bed, Different Dreams by Ed Park. It’s a Pynchon-esque extravaganza and it blew my mind!
Nice tip; thank you. And thank you for the interview as well. It’s been a pleasure to work with you since we first met.
McKenzie and her Dog of the North have found the “cool dry place” that Charles Portis spoke of in his prose, where a simmering chuckle dances through almost every page— until you unexpectedly find a lump in your throat.
It’s really quite something, and I only wish the old man was alive to see it. Congratulations, and here’s to more quixotic adventures!
Lisa’s Dog Of The North chases Charles’s Dog of the South like a dingo at Mexican dog racing track! Great interview too.
This has been a divine Portis spring of late. There is now an omnibus of Portis’ work published by the Library of America, edited by Jay Jennings. Check it out - https://www.amazon.com/Charles-Portis-Collected-Atlantis-Writings/dp/1598537466