Dodge City by Patrick Dewitt Review – A Wild Draft-Dodging Road Trip

Patrick deWitt broke through with a western, 2011’s Booker-shortlisted The Sisters Brothers. Now, he has taken on another hallowed American genre: the road novel. Recent works by Miranda July and Ben Markovits have, in very different ways, used the idea of the road trip as a way to dramatise midlife crisis. As befits a writer who is, in so many ways, a throwback, Dodge City returns the genre to its roots: the 1960s, and youth as opposed to middle age. A short précis – a cross-country journey undertaken by a UCLA drop-out armed only with a bag of amphetamines – makes the book sound like an Easy Rider tribute. It is typical for deWitt novels to be compared to films rather than other books. But in this case, something very different transpires.

The novel opens with our protagonist, Leland “Lee” Clarke, receiving his draft notice – he is to be sent to Vietnam. He has just been expelled from UCLA for assaulting a fellow student, a rich hippy who condescends to him. This “event of violence” (a “one-punch wonder”, as Lee’s father calls it) costs him his draft deferment. Lee doesn’t consider himself a conscientious objector – that is only another form of heroism, and “the myth of the hero is at the heart of my critique of the entire exercise”. But nor does he want to go to Vietnam. He decides, instead, to dodge – to head to Canada. Younger readers may note with envy that being kicked out of college mattered a lot less when you weren’t tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.

He has, in any case, been thinking of ending things with Cal, short for Calliope, the beautiful blond daughter of east coast intellectuals. Lee is the unglamorous product of a broken home in Concrete, Washington. Cal finds him exotic: “a patrician redneck”, meaning someone who irons his T-shirts. Over time, their class differences have begun to grate. The hippy he punches is a friend of Cal’s.

To raise money for the journey, he sells his own car and signs up to a “drive-away” service, delivering a brand-new Jaguar E-Type to its owner. Since he may be saying goodbye to his country for good, he plots an L-shaped route from Los Angeles to New Jersey that will allow him to say individual farewells to his father in Concrete, his mother in Montana, and his sister, a trainee nurse, in Manhattan. His brother Harry, in Minnesota, he plans to avoid. There is ancient history there.

DeWitt is a throwback because he has never been near a master of fine arts programme (he dropped out of high school) and because he writes what is unquestionably “literary fiction” for a large audience, and makes a living from doing so. To Chad Harbach’s dilemma for the young American writer, “MFA v NYC”, deWitt’s triumphant answer is “neither”. You see this in his simultaneous commitment to readerly pleasure and literary artifice; and above all in his prose.

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The reader can expect vivid minor characters, hijinks, and a tone on the margin between silliness and misery

With his puns, archaisms, tics (“certain of the” for “some”), fondness for the passive voice and tendency to use two or three words more than strictly needed, deWitt violates almost every current MFA norm. Like one of his favourite writers, Ivy Compton-Burnett, he is a master of arch dialogue: more eloquent, and usually more enjoyable, than the naturalistic kind. DeWitt’s idiosyncrasies are not always euphonious – he can take his preference for Latin over Anglo-Saxon verbs to irritating lengths – but they remind us of the difference between having style and having a style.

Where deWitt is most contemporary is in his preoccupation with the past. Almost all his novels have historical settings, and his protagonists are stalked by old traumas. This is why Dodge City is no Easy Rider. If the essence of hippiedom is living in the present, and the special privilege of youth is ownership of the future, Lee Clarke’s business is with his past. The visits to his parents and siblings – in the end, he finds that he can’t avoid Harry – are not token goodbyes, but attempts to settle emotional accounts.

The journey itself is less one of self-discovery than of the reader discovering Lee, who is from the Hans Castorp school of hero. “Perfectly ordinary, if engaging” is how Thomas Mann described Hans. The reader sees Lee’s ordinariness right away, and over the course of the book grows more and more engaged. This is a deWitt novel, of course, and so the reader can expect – and is supplied with – vivid minor characters, hijinks, and a tone that lives confidently on the margin between silliness and misery.

Over the course of his career, however, deWitt has changed. His books have become more contemplative, less rambunctious; if he has always trafficked in real feelings in slightly unreal settings, the settings are growing realer, and the feelings softer. Dodge City is not exactly optimistic, but its emotional tendency is towards something few would have expected of the author of The Sisters Brothers: tenderness.

Dodge City by Patrick deWitt is published by HarperCollins (£18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.