Reviewed by Sam Sacks. Full text here:
Australian writer Jack Cox’s frisky and disorienting debut “Dodge Rose” (Dalkey Archive, 201 pages, $16) is part legal satire and part mash note to James Joyce. Following the death of shut-in Dodge Rose, her adopted daughter Maxine and niece Eliza try to sort out her wildly disorganized estate. Lacking any of the needed documentation—Maxine can’t even prove that Dodge was her mother—they’re plunged into a hopeless legal mess. Then, with no segue whatsoever, the narrative turns back to what may be the 1930s to present scenes through the eyes of Dodge herself. It’s up to the reader to puzzle out any connections between then and now.
The real game, though, is played in language. Mr. Cox has a Joycean love of colloquialisms, puns and lists, and he modulates between drastically different registers of speech. There’s an impenetrable 20-page monologue on Australian property law rendered in Latin phrases and flauntingly obscure locutions. Maxine thinks, “I had never made plans, being by nurture far from pleonectic.” The flashback, in contrast, adopts the child’s stream-of-consciousness made famous in “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” Dodge remembers being punished for cursing: “a mouth full of warm water. the word is wearing off the soap. dirty. like it says it is. she says she will wash it out again if i. i will not.” This brilliant showoff of a book can seem like it was more fun to write than it is to read. But for a reader open to linguistic spectacle, it’s a memorable performance.
