All Who Wander Are Not Lost: The Joy of Elizabeth McKenzie’s The Dog of the North
In school, I was taught that detective stories are never really about the crimes. Crimes are just McGuffin’s, red herring excuses, to wander about and tour cities, while collecting funny clues. No one knows this better than Elizabeth McKenzie. In her early noir tales, raincoats and ice cream sprinkles would take over the stories, making one forget about the crime one is trying to solve. Her latest novel, The Dog of The North, is a celebration of wandering itself.
In a typical detective story, I often feel irritated at being pulled too quickly through the plot. And eccentric, know-it-all detectives -- forget it. The Dog of the North has all of the voyeuristic joy of a detective novel --- but because the tour of people’s lives comes from Penny’s vague desire to help, we finally have a “detective story” in which we’re able to recognize the joy of wandering itself.
Tourism, curiosity, and empathy become elided as we meet the book’s delightful characters: an inept accountant who lives in his office and gives his hairpiece to his dog; Penny’s science-minded grandma who shuts her former lovers bones up in her woodshed so that she can study the effects of radiation on a Hiroshima survivor and many others. Where in a typical detective piece one comes away from the sordid tour feeling frightened of the city’s exotic (read diverse) aspects, here, it’s the opposite. When Penny’s sister comments, “Didn’t you just meet these people a few days ago” we’re with the author in asking “so what.”
The people are interesting, delightful, the whole tour is a lovely vacation from which one comes away wondering why most people cover up funny details in their lives with such a dull veneer. Isn’t everyone a little crazy underneath, isn’t getting to know each other better, the whole point? We need more loving books like this.
By Eireen Nealand
Eireene Nealand is a fiction writer with degrees in Literature and Political Science from UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley. Her work has won her multiple awards, including two Fulbright fellowships, and Elizabeth Kostova and Ivan Klima Awards.Recent books include The Darkroom, a translation (with Alta Ifland) of Marguerite Duras’ screenplay, Le camion (Contra Mundum April 2021), and The Nest (Nova Kultura 2017) a documentary photo book (with Megan Lueneburg) about a Bulgarian village festival designed to heal social traumas.
