Winkler’s latest novel is ambitious, compelling and bleakly comic; it scratches a metaphysical itch you didn’t realise you had
In 2016 Michael Winkler wrote an award-winning essay that mentions his “schisms” of self and experiences with depression, the pain of which “intermittently seemed unendurable”. Five years later, his surreal, “exploded non-fiction novel” Grimmish – the first self-published work shortlisted for the Miles Franklin prize – told the story of the “pain-eating” boxer Joe Grim. Now, in Griefdogg, another wry, existentially probing novel, Winkler is again plumbing psyches – his own, yours and mine.
Griefdogg begins with an unnamed narrator, an implied surrogate for Winkler, struggling to draft a speech for a funeral. The deceased, we learn, is Jeffrey Watson-Johnson, a middle-aged, climate-conscious, fitness-obsessed hydrologist (a studier of water flow) living in Mildura. He fancies himself a Don Juan, though he and his wife, Martine, haven’t had sex in three years and seven months. He’s a vegan, community-minded and a “straight arrow”. He’s disciplined and monotonous, an uninspiring yet effective presence on the tennis court. He restacks the dishwasher the way he likes it.