31 Days of Short Stories: Day 15. “Dogs in Winter,” by Eden Robinson

Posted 15 August, 2008 in Short Stories, 31 Days of Short Stories |

From Traplines

Eden Robinson’s story “Dogs in Winter” announces itself right from its first two sentences: “Aunt Genna’s poodle, Picnic, greeted people by humping their legs. He had an incredible grip.” The message: this ain’t your grandmother’s CanLit. Robinson’s writing is tough and sinewy, shot through with violence and moments of unexpected humour. Gail Anderson-Dargatz nailed the uniqueness of Robinson’s authorial voice nicely when she said that Robinson will “tickle and slap you with the same hand.”

“Dogs in Winter” is the story of Lisa, the daughter of a sociopathic woman who kills pit bulls and moose, and graduates to humans, eventually murdering seven people, including her husband, in a serial-killing spree for which she is convicted and jailed. Lisa’s teen years are spent trying to outrun her mother’s malevolent influence, but she is haunted by her childhood and its violent past. She dreams of the lake where her mother used to take her camping; in the dream, her mother calmly shoots a moose between the eyes. The moose collapses into the water, and Lisa follows it, wading in up to her waist:

I see the moose surfacing. It rises out of the water, its coat dripping, its eyes filled with dirt. It towers over me, whispering, mud dribbling from its mouth like saliva. I lean toward it, but no matter how hard I try, I can never understand what the moose is saying.

For Lisa, the moose simultaneously represents strength and her mother’s irrepressible violence. Female moose are able to defend themselves from grizzly bears and wolf packs, and during mating season, the male moose is “one of the most dangerous animals, frenzied enough to inflict death or dismemberment on those who stand between him and her and incapable of distinguishing between friend and enemy.” This quality of not being able to distinguish friend and enemy, which Lisa associates with the moose and with her mother, is symbolized in a picture Lisa purchases, which shows a moose giving birth to a human baby, while in the background stands a woman holding a drawn bow.

When the young girl helps her mother kill a deer by the lake where they camp, her mother smears the animal’s blood on her daughter’s cheeks and hands her the animal’s heart, saying, “Now you’re a woman.” This unexpected association rears up in Lisa’s memory when, as a teenager, she has dinner at the home of her high school lab partner’s well-to-do parents. Lisa vomits red wine on the handwoven tablecloth, eliciting a withering response from her friend’s mother: “I have a Persian carpet in the living room. Perhaps you’d like to shit on it.”

The comment is indicative of Robinson’s ability to hold humour and outrage in a single moment; she makes her readers laugh while dragging them through unremittingly dark material. Lisa’s dispassionate first-person narration adds to the level of discomfort; she calmly relates her mother’s crimes, including the murder of Lisa’s beloved Aunt Genna, as well as her own various suicide attempts.

In addition, “Dogs in Winter” evinces an ambitious structure, which shuffles back and forth in time, unfolding the events in an achronological manner, heightening the dreamlike feel of the story, and lending deeper associative meaning to the various incidents within it.

Richard Ford, in the introduction to The Granta Book of the American Short Story, wrote:

As we read, we can sense the precarious nature of any literary construction, its barely containable excitation of words which mimics our own suffusion in experience, and whose eventual style, like a ballerina’s line, is an expression of the manner by which chaos is conditionally and beautifully held at bay.

I can think of no better way of describing Eden Robinson’s achievement in “Dogs in Winter.” The construction of her literary edifice is indeed precarious, held in place by the author’s absolute control over her materials, and by the “barely containable excitation” of her words. The style and vigour with which Robinson relates her story is at once potent and redemptive — a mechanism whereby, for its duration, “chaos is conditionally and beautifully held at bay.”

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