In The Dog of the North (Penguin Press), author Elizabeth McKenzie finds humor in the absurdities of life.
It’s a dog’s life.
Santa Cruz–based novelist Elizabeth McKenzie has a knack for anthropomorphizing the animal kingdom to teach us lessons about our own.
In 2016’s The Portable Veblen, her protagonist, Veblen Amundsen-Hovda — named for the maverick anti-materialist economist Thorstein Veblen — carries on lengthy conversations with a squirrel nesting in her attic, to the consternation of Paul Vreeland, her neurologist fiancé. The couple is also dealing with their dysfunctional families — his hippie parents in Humboldt County and her overprotective, boundary-breaking mother. As if all that weren’t enough, McKenzie addresses the ravages of late-stage capitalism when Vreeland invents a device to treat battlefield brain trauma, only to find it rushed to market by a greedy pharmaceutical company.
The offbeat tale, handled with the author’s uniquely comic verve, won a California Book Award and was longlisted for a National Book Award. Born in Los Angeles, McKenzie graduated from UC Santa Cruz and did a stint as a staff editor at the AtlanticMonthly before returning west to get her master’s in English and creative writing at Stanford.
Her new book, The Dog of the North, is an equally high-spirited account of the adventures of Penny Rush once she leaves her loser husband, Sherman, who’s abandoned his academic career (and a proposed dissertation on “Phenomenological Disunity in the Heterodoxical in the Post Bubonic Mongol Khan”) to start a mobile knife-sharpening business. Not to mention the fact that he’s been cheating on her with a woman named Bebe Sinatra.
Santa Cruz–based writer and editor Elizabeth McKenzie
At the novel’s outset, Penny is on the train from the Salinas Valley to Santa Barbara to try to straighten out the complicated affairs of Dr. Louise Pincer, her ditzy, disagreeable grandmother, a former pediatrician who keeps a Scintillator, a device that looks like an “undersized rocket launcher … to fend off unwelcome visits from Meals on Wheels volunteers.” Penny enlists her grandmother’s accountant, Burt Lampey, in the effort to fix the doctor’s financial muddle and ends up sleeping in his van, the eponymous Dog of the North (the title is a sly tribute to True Grit author Charles Portis’ cult classic, The Dog of the South).
When Burt is hospitalized, Penny helps care for his Pomeranian, Kweecoats, a phonetic pronunciation of Quixote. (Cervantes’ picaresque tradition is clearly alive and well in Santa Barbara.) And, yes, Penny does communicate with a talking grunion in the course of her travels, even if the fish is less loquacious than Veblen’s squirrel. “I just think there should be an animal in every book, or at least every book of mine,” McKenzie avows.
The human animals — particularly in the form of familial conflict — are paramount here, too. When not dealing with her grandmother, Penny is on a quest to find her parents, who have mysteriously disappeared after relocating to Australia. It’s a plot point with autobiographical reverberations: The author’s own environmentalist parents moved Down Under “partly because Reagan had become president; they couldn’t take it,” she says.
Is writing, then, a form of family therapy? “A lot of things that swirled around me when I was growing up were very mysterious,” she acknowledges. “Untangling some of the things that were in the air has been a lifelong pursuit. But all of those things lead to larger questions, so I try not to keep it completely focused (on family). My son tells me that the new novel is about western expansion and colonialism. I’ll take that, too.”
The author somehow manages to juggle her writing schedule with editorial duties, working remotely as a senior editor at the Chicago Quarterly Review and as managing editor of the Catamaran Literary Review, which also sponsors an annual writers conference in Pebble Beach. “I tend to do writing in the morning and editorial stuff in the afternoon,” she says. “As I told a friend recently, I don’t necessarily have that many good writing days, but I can always have a good editorial day. Something satisfying can happen there.”
She’s also part of a larger literary community in Santa Cruz — including Jonathan Franzen, George Saunders and Catamaran contributor Karen Joy Fowler — and cites a host of influences, from Haruki Murakami to Nell Zink to sci-fi star Charlie Jane Anders. While McKenzie says she’d be honored to be considered in their company, she’s very much a formidable voice in her own right. Both The Portable Veblen and The Dog of the North are laugh-out-loud reads with serious subtexts.
“I like dealing with darker themes, but somehow I gravitate toward the absurdity of the situation,” she notes. Truth can be stranger than fiction, though. McKenzie’s now-deceased grandmother was indeed a Santa Barbara pediatrician who had her very own Scintillator. “We keep it in our living room,” she says. 
Elizabeth McKenzie will be in conversation about The Dog of the North with fellow novelist Gail Tsukiyama at 1 p.m. on March 19 at Book Passage in Corte Madera.
