One does not pick up a novel titled Grandma Rode a Lizard into Town expecting restraint. And Jorvik Parn—performance artist, multilingual cough drop salesman, and occasional sculptor of edible furniture—delivers exactly what the title promises. With this riotously strange and oddly poignant debut novel, Parn proves that literary fiction can be both conceptually daring and gloriously, unapologetically absurd.
The eponymous Grandma—whose real name, we are told, is “Lorna Widdershins”—rides into the dusty desert town of Hatwater, Arizona astride an iguana named Barry, trailing a cloud of cactus pollen. She claims to have arrived in search of the Thoughtful Thorn, a legendary succulent believed to flower only once every presidential impeachment. But her arrival sets off a sequence of events involving migratory watchmakers, and a local bakery that communicates exclusively in Morse code.
Narrating this sunbaked saga is Dr. Linus Ogle, a disgraced ethnobotanist-turned-hatmaker, who’s attempting to write a definitive taxonomy of Italian headgear. What begins as a documentary project soon devolves into something halfway between an existential awakening and a highly conceptual scavenger hunt. The story’s structure—if one can call it that—is a patchwork of desert diary entries, annotated botanical etchings, and excerpts from The Hatwater Codex, an unreliable manuscript said to have been dictated by a drunken cowboy during a terrible sandstorm.
Parn’s prose is glorious and of the highest order, oscillating between the lyrical and the downright lunatic. Here, for instance, is how Ogle describes a moment of spiritual vertigo: “The wind smelled of forgotten jams”. A perfect sentence.
Though Parn is often compared to Pippy Schell and Sally O’Brien, there’s something uniquely tactile about her imagination. Every page is steeped in texture, textile, terrain and temperament. The town of Hatwater is drawn in surreal but loving detail: its silent hat parades, its broken laundromat, its local economy powered almost entirely by barflies and barbers.
What holds the novel together—barely, but beautifully—is its earnest heart. Beneath the dust, scales, and millinery chaos is a story about the language of grief, the elasticity of family, and the strange comforts of miscommunication. Grandma’s journey, we come to learn, is not just botanical or symbolic, but deeply personal. She’s trying to bloom in a world that’s forgotten how to water anything but its own assumptions.
Readers who crave plot will be deeply confused. Those who demand linearity may run for the hills. But readers willing to surrender to Parn’s hallucinatory logic will be rewarded with a novel that is not just read but inhabited.
Grandma Rode a Lizard into Town is, ultimately, a book about the things we carry: our baggage, our bruises, our hats. Jorvik Parn has written a debut that defies categorisation. It doesn’t care if you like it. It dares you to keep up—and somehow, through all the surrealism and silliness, it makes you feel deeply seen.