Patrick deWitt has always been a writer who looks backward while his contemporaries look forward. His breakthrough, The Sisters Brothers, was a Booker-shortlisted western that treated violence with the same dry comic remove as a Buster Keaton film. Dodge City is set in the late 1960s, but it is not a counterculture novel. The flower-power moment is, for its protagonist Lee Clarke, mostly an irritant — the friend he punches is a rich hippy who condescends to him, and that single punch costs Lee his college deferment and sets the plot in motion. Lee is a drop-out from Concrete, Washington, which is both a real place and, the novel implies, a description of his circumstances: solid, grey, unromantic. He is not a conscientious objector — he explicitly rejects heroism in any direction. He does not want to go to Vietnam, but his reason for dodging is less principled than personal. His plan to drive a brand-new Jaguar E-Type cross-country to Canada, stopping to say goodbye to his scattered family, is shaped less by anti-war politics than by the emotional ledger he has never quite closed. His brother Harry, in Minnesota, is supposed to be avoided. He cannot avoid him. DeWitt's prose is the main event, and it is genuinely distinctive. His archaisms, his passive constructions, his preference for Latin verbs over Anglo-Saxon ones, his tenderness for two or three extra words where one would do — these are not affectations but a coherent stylistic system that creates a formal distance from the material just wide enough to let the feeling in. The review's comparison to Ivy Compton-Burnett is exact: the dialogue is arch, eloquent, and more enjoyable than naturalism has any right to be. The tics are occasionally irritating, but they consistently remind you that someone is choosing these words, not just transcribing experience. The Hans Castorp comparison — Thomas Mann's 'perfectly ordinary, if engaging' protagonist — is equally apt and usefully deflating. Lee is not a hero in any available 1960s mode. He is not radicalized, not enlightened, not destroyed. The road trip, that most American of self-discovery engines, does not transform him. What it does is allow the reader to discover him, incrementally, through a series of encounters with the minor characters deWitt does better than almost any American writer working today. The vivid bit-part players are not decoration; they are the medium through which Lee's ordinary depths are sounded. The evolution of deWitt's career is worth naming directly. The Sisters Brothers was rambunctious, The Undermajordomo Minor was arch and fairy-tale strange, Ablutions was bleakly funny. Dodge City is, by his standards, soft. That is not a criticism — the softness is earned. The book's emotional tendency is toward tenderness, which turns out to be harder to pull off than comedy or menace. DeWitt gets there. The final Harry encounter, which the novel has carefully withheld, is handled with a restraint that hits harder than any of the hijinks that surround it. What Dodge City is not: a counterculture statement, a political novel about Vietnam, or a nostalgia trip. What it is: a character study disguised as a road novel, by a writer who has never been to an MFA programme and whose prose shows it — in the best sense. The book is short, funny in the right places, genuinely moving in the right places, and populated with people you will want to spend time with. For readers who have been waiting to see whether deWitt could add emotional range to his considerable comic gifts, this is the answer.
