DOGGONE

In Ark’s (Pants on Fire!, 2013) novel, an artist in Hawaii loses her philandering husband to a younger woman, then two of her children to suicide.

The morning of their 25th wedding anniversary, Bullet Pulaski tells his wife, Lucky, that he wants a divorce. Leaving her and his three children, he moves in with one of his art students yet continues for months to wander in and out of the family home and the studio where Lucky fires pottery and he paints. Lucky is fully developed: Her Catholic upbringing has been eclipsed by tarot readings and New Age spirituality; an early desire to perform onstage was discarded in favor of motherhood, a deep commitment to her art and an overwhelming need for love. Though at first she aches for her husband, as his narcissistic behavior worsens and she recalls years of indignities endured, her love turns bitter, fueling a divorce every bit as nasty as her parents’. The scenes Ark writes are vivid and real—Christmas morning destroyed when Bullet’s pet donkey devours breakfast, or Lucky, when she is desperate for sensation, kissing her own arm and masturbating with “Moby Pickle” from the fridge. The divorce goes on and on, and time grows soupy, with the story stalling amid the depression and chaos. There are confusing jumps through time; Ark writes that “1989, 1990, 1991 had come and gone…and no divorce,” though about 140 pages later, “fourteen months had passed since Lucky filed for divorce.” Two men wander into and out of her life, but the pain they cause is trifling compared with the losses that will come. As tragedy overtakes Lucky, the prose is eloquently anguished: “How did she find herself still there, isolated on a windswept shore in the midst of the great Pacific, her womb wrenched loose as though ripped and fed upon by grief-starved sharks?”

An overly long yet honest account of a family ensnared by tragedy.