Penny Rush is having an interesting time of it. Her academic husband Sherman has chucked it all in to run a knife-sharpening business, her marriage has subsequently failed and her grandparents (separated) in Santa Barbara are each having a crisis. Penny leaves her job and her husband and heads to California to sort out Pincer (grandmother), who has been caught in possession of a strange weapon, and Arlo (grandfather), whose much younger second wife wants to put him in a retirement home.
When Penny gets to Santa Barbara, she is met by Pincer’s accountant, Burt, and together they cook up a plan to relieve Pincer of the deadly weapon, and of a million other things she’s been hoarding. Penny is to stay with Burt, but he’s living in his office. Things are far from ideal. Pincer is a retired doctor, a brilliant but difficult woman, and one of the brightest characters in a host of them in this novel.
There are many other things going on with Penny: her parents have been missing in the Australian outback for five years, her biological father Gaspard stalks her and she finds Burt’s brother Dale irresistibly attractive - against her better judgement. A lot happens to Penny on a daily basis and that’s what gives the novel its joyous, hectic feel. It’s exhausting to be Penny, who struggles with understanding people; she knows it and we live it vicariously.
The novel is in parts and we travel with Penny from the US to Australia, and back again. The parts don’t feel separate as the exquisitely-varied cast of characters are with her physically or by phone all the way, maintaining the sense of madcap urgency.
I haven’t even mentioned what The Dog of the North is - it’s Burt’s van, a vehicle that becomes dear to Penny and is a character in its own right. The Dog of the North is bizarre, laugh-out-loud funny, affirming and poignant. It’s about being a person who doesn’t fit in, until she does. I loved it.
