Pairing sweetness with a healthy dose of irony.
The Dog Year, by Wisconsin author Ann Garvin, is a very funny book about sadness and loss. It's also only a little bit about dogs and a lot about the ways in which relationships can help you heal.
In The Dog Year we meet Lucy Peterman, a doctor whose inability to deal with the accidental death of her husband and unborn child causes her to take up stealing medical supplies from the hospital where she works. Lucy steals not because she wants to use or sell the supplies, but because having them makes her feel safe, prepared for any emergency; it's clear she's compensating for the ways in which she could not save her family from disaster. But the stealing is also a cry for help, and it works. Lucy is eventually caught and placed on leave under the condition that she can have her job back if she completes counseling and a 12-step program. Her journey through the program and the people (and dogs) she connects with on the way take up most of the novel.
Lucy has lived most of her life in a bubble. Smart and well educated, she leveraged her advantages to land a well-paying job and a loyal husband. Despite this, Lucy has always been a bit of a whiner, unable to see how good she's had it. Her forced reeducation among the denizens of her 12-step program provides both comic relief and real poignancy. This setup also lets Garvin introduce a handful of more colorful characters, both human and canine, and provides Lucy with a chance to step outside her own grief and connect with reality. Her life one year later (after "the dog year") is greatly improved, though to Garvin's credit, the story doesn't unfold the way you might necessarily expect. This book is heartwarming, but Garvin's use of irony helps the reader avoid OD-ing on all the sweetness and hope.
Garvin is a professor of health and nutrition at UW-Whitewater, and The Dog Year is set in southern Wisconsin, as was her previous book, On Maggie's Watch. Garvin plays up her status as a literary outsider on her blog and in her promotional interviews, and she credits her success at getting published in part to her Midwestern gee-whiz naiveté. This "who, me?" approach is belied a bit by Garvin's adept use of social media and knack for self-promotion, but who cares? Her competence and humility are attributes prized by all Midwesterners.
Pairing sweetness with a healthy dose of irony.
