Dog War

At the beginning of Precious Higginson’s odyssey, she’s holed up in a Jamaican mountain home with her schoolmaster husband. For a middle-aged woman who’s spent most of her life in the city, it amounts to a near exile. It’s no good for her nerves; she spends much of her time under her bed praying to “Jamaican Jesus” and fearing that a murderer will come to get her. But it’s her husband who dies first, in a car accident, sending Precious to live with her son in Kingston and his domineering wife. Precious’s old ways bump up against the home’s matriarch, and she’s bounced to Miami to live with her cop daughter and her hairdressing husband.

A family comedy par excellence, Winkler negotiates the fine line between laughing with and at a character with aplomb. Precious is endearingly silly, clinging to old ways as if they were family. When she arrives at her Floridian daughter Shirley’s house, she’s instantly suspicious of her husband, Henry. She pledges that she’ll happily discuss manly topics with him, such as “the criminal mind, slaughter in Africa, or the guttersnipe tactics of English football hooligans…. But if he should broach the subject of perms or dyes or hairstyles to her, she intended to yawn politely and remind him of his manhood.” Eventually, Precious lands a job as a live-in maid for a rich widow in Fort Lauderdale, and the persistent assaults on her faith—both religion and presumptions—eventually shake her enough to force a retreat to Jamaica.

Winkler’s timing is well honed, and this comedy of cultural and generational clashes hits the right notes nearly every time. Some jokes become belabored, but Winkler is able to keep the novel rolling by throwing Precious into one pickle after another. This is Winkler’s first novel to be published in America (though we know him from the screenplays for movies like The Annihilation of Fish and, yes, Cool Runnings), but his reputation as a comic novelist precedes him. With Dog War, he more than lives up to it.—Jonathan Messinger