Bah humbug!

>> Cordelia Strube's The Barking Dog is depressing as hell

by JULIET WATERS

The Barking Dog is not the novel for everyone during this holiday season. I found it Christmasey, but I do Christmas differently than most.

As the mob lines up for the latest feel-good movie, happy to plunge into the market of denial, I sit alone on dark December afternoons with a feel-bad novel. I like to work up just the right bad mood beforehand so that I'll be grateful for even the slightest bit of happiness on December 25. And nobody brings on that mood better than Cordelia Strube.

After her last novel, Dr. Kabfleish and the Chicken Restaurant, about Raymond, a passive restaurant manager who goes looking for his birth mother, I didn't think Strube could write a darker dysfunctional family novel. She took an overdone, trite scenario and turned it into an endlessly complex hyper-realistic nightmare. Raymond's mother turns out to be a white-trash horror show, while his father remains unknown. He could have been one of a couple of guys she was dating, or a ski-masked rapist who was hiding in her cupboard. As Raymond gets to know his long-lost twin brother, the odds start to favour the ski-masked guy.

Could there exist a family that would make Raymond feel better about his own on Christmas? Probably not, but the Pentlands of The Barking Dog come pretty close.

Those already familiar with the Strubean world may prefer not to read the following plot summary, to preserve the surprise of every toxic plot twist. Or they can read on, secure that in every Strube novel there will be so many twists that no review could capture more than a slim fraction.

On the surface, Greer Pentland is a statistic. Her bad life is not unlike many bad lives. Like most people she's not crazy about her job as a real estate agent. Like almost every parent of an angry teenager, she watches helplessly as her son's soul is vacuumed out of him by TV. Like roughly half of all middle-aged, middle-class women, she's recovering from a bad divorce. (Her ex-husband Jerry left her for the slutty neighbour.) And like one in 15 women, she's battling breast cancer. She's recently had a mastectomy and hates her indifferent, condescending doctor. But in many, many ways Greer is unique.

She is haunted by memories of a nasty, emotionally abusive mother who used to masturbate in front of her school friends and physically abuse her younger sister. That Greer's parents were mauled to death by black bears in a national park has not brought closure. Her son, Sam, is imprisoned in more than just a TV trance. He's always had a history of very deep sleep walking. As the novel opens he's on trial for bludgeoning an elderly couple down the street. (If that murder sounds familiar, it's worth noting that Strube, who now lives in Toronto, grew up in Montreal.) The defense is arguing non-insane automatism, but the public wants him locked away forever.

Things are looking up though. Another gruesome crime is being tried down the hall from them. The defense is turning it into a race issue and the building is so jammed with angry black people that the angry white people are scared away. For a brief moment the Pentlands' problems have become yesterday's news.

But tomorrow's news will always be worse. Greer's Aunt Sybil, who lives with them, rarely bathes and refuses to get the pacemaker she needs, likes to recite morbid gruesome news stories like a Greek chorus. At one point Greer snaps: "Sybil I know this is hard for you to understand, but this information doesn't make me feel better."

To which Sybil responds: "Who said it was supposed to? Who says we have to feel good? Since when did feelings rule the day?" Questions we might want to recall a couple of weeks from now.

The Barking Dog, by Cordelia Strube, Thomas Allen, hc, 432pp, $34.95