There’s a scattered, unsettling feeling to journalist and magazine editor Elizabeth Kelly’s first novel. Maybe it’s the seemingly endless jumble of canines constantly getting underfoot. Maybe it’s the way the narrator, Collie Flanagan, darts like a pinball between the chaos of his parents’ home and the mandated order of his grandfather, an imposing and rigid newspaper baron named Peregrine Lowell.

Mostly, however, the reader’s unease springs from Collie’s uncertainty about pretty much everything in his life. All that does seem clear to him is that his mother is certifiably crazy, his father and live-in “maiden uncle” Tom are drunks, and his younger brother Bing is a raffish, lovable cad who garners their mother’s adoration even while Collie himself earns only her disdain.

The way that this unbelievably dysfunctional family treat one another is so vile that reading about their interactions becomes physically off-putting. Any sane person would pack up and get the heck away from these people as quickly as possible. Alas, poor Collie stumbles from one disaster to another, always searching for that elusive “something” that will make him feel like a human being with some sort of purpose. Even when he becomes a doctor in the hope of making a contribution to society, the results are calamitous, and leave him more broken than before.

Collie and his family are truly tragic figures, ruled by their neuroses and vices, which range from money to alcohol to women to religious hypocrisy. These people are a mess, and the result is that the book feels messy as well. At times, the reader is drawn into Collie’s story, hoping that he will find a way through his darkness and solitude. But the book also repels with its cacophony of imagery and overabundance of big characters. Despite a few moments of levity – mainly resulting from Uncle Tom’s insults directed at Collie (which belie his love for the boy) – this is a heavy, noisy novel that may be too much for some readers