The Dog, the Family: A Household Tale

August Kleinzahler’s description of his early years, which seem to centre around his homely mutt, named Twenty Grand, or Granny for short after a famous racehorse, is as unique as anything I’ve ever heard of. The constant criticism that Kleinzahler claims he would receive from his parents and grandmother would generally be grounds for the beginning of a depressing memoir, but no. His zany descriptions of his glue sniffing brother or bookworm sister help shed a different light on what was certainly not a flattering childhood. The way he describes it, in fact, makes everything that happened seem funny. For example, the dog and children hiding in fear in the upstairs bathroom while their father went off and destroyed everything in sight. Kleinzahler claims that he was a mistake, that he was conceived while his mother was in a drunken frenzy, and that her mother (his grandmother) had an insane rule over his mom and her sisters. These are all ingredients for a disastrous childhood, but through the eyes of August Kleinzahler, it all seems almost normal. He makes it hard not to laugh at such gruesome misfortune, the way he describes the various characters in his early childhood, especially the dog. The chapter ends with the death of their increasingly fragile pooch, which somehow seems to be the only sad part in a chapter that describes an extremely depressing childhood.