Here is where McKenzie’s book differs most from Portis’s: It’s ultimately a family novel. “Though nearly five years had passed,” she reflects, “I hadn’t really been able to accept or even think about it.” Neither their remains nor their car was ever recovered, and there lingers, in Penny’s mind anyway, the possibility that their disappearance was deliberate. They had moved to Australia “because they had liked the climate and the geomorphology” and also possibly “to denounce the American Dream.” If you can bear with it through these high jinks, the heart of the book concerns Penny’s parents, who disappeared on a trip to Mount Isa in the Australian outback. Penny and her grandfather witness their rented Land Cruiser swallowed up by a sinkhole. An estranged biological father named Gaspard launches a sneak attack. Something called the Scintillator, which looks “like an undersized rocket launcher,” is seized from Pincer’s house. Irradiated bones are discovered in a woodshed. ![]() These people are unable to avoid bodily injury. Burt is admitted with a ruptured ulcer, Pincer is admitted for psychiatric evaluation, Penny is admitted for a septic stab wound in the leg, then again for a gash in the other leg. Penny has been summoned by Pincer’s accountant and close associate Burt Lampey, a large, bewigged man in his 50s, with problems of his own.īurt has a dog, a “woolly orange puffball” named Kweecoats, but the title also refers to his old, sea-green van: “He said his ex had named it in honor of a beloved novel with a similar name.” Burt and Penny make a plan to remove Pincer from her home and have it cleaned, which sets into motion a series of events involving intercontinental travel, Burt’s attractive younger brother Dale and a murder investigation.įrom Santa Cruz to Santa Barbara to Brisbane, Australia, to Tyler, Texas, the plot gallops along, leaning heavily on people going to the hospital. Her living arrangements have raised alarms with Adult Protective Services. She is in her 80s, suffers intermittent dementia, lives in a house full of rats and hoarded jars. ![]() Penny’s grandmother, known as Pincer, presents the more pressing of the two. She has just under $850 to her name, a broken marriage behind her, and has been tasked with helping to mitigate two crises related to her grandparents. Penny Rush has quit her job as a dental receptionist to travel south from Santa Cruz to Santa Barbara. “The Dog of the North,” a new novel by Elizabeth McKenzie ( “The Portable Veblen”), borrows that book’s road trip structure, canine preoccupations and antic style. The dog is also a dog (Guy Dupree’s) and it’s also, arguably, Ray. The dog of the title is the name of a bus belonging to a crooked doctor Ray encounters in Mexico. That's my belief," she continued.įamily friends said the children's parents - Enrique and Pamela Doughton - are completely distraught.In the road novel “The Dog of the South,” Charles Portis’s feckless hero Ray Midge traces a route from Little Rock to Belize in pursuit of an acquaintance named Guy Dupree, who has stolen his car, his credit cards and his wife. "The only thing I can think of is that God put them to sleep before he took them so they wouldn't suffer. She would've gotten up barefoot, naked, whatever, she would've just wrapped those babies and jumped out the window, broken every bone in her body, walked through the flames, it didn't matter. ![]() fierce maternal instincts," said family friend Martha Cerda. We just loved her so much, she was just so friendly and outgoing and such a wonderful personality."įriends said Yracheta was fearlessly protective of her grandchildren and whatever happened must have overwhelmed them, preventing the grandmother from saving her grandchildren and herself. "It's hard to take, like I said, there's no words to describe it. "It still hasn't sunk in," said family friend America Medrano. When firefighters arrived, they encountered large flames ripping through multiple windows of the building.Ĭlose friends of the family told ABC7 54-year-old Georgina Yracheta was babysitting her two grandchildren - 3-month old Luna Doughton and 3-year-old Solomon Doughton - while their parents were out on a date. at an apartment complex along Amar Road, according to the West Covina Fire Department. (KABC) - A community in West Covina is heartbroken after learning the three people killed in an apartment fire on Sunday were a grandmother and her two young grandchildren, one of whom was a 3-month-old baby. A community in West Covina is heartbroken after learning the three people killed in an apartment fire on Sunday were a grandmother and her two young grandchildren, one of whom was a 3-month-old baby.
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