Dodge City by Patrick deWitt: a wise novel that contains the best insult you’ll hear all year

Dodge City

Author: Patrick deWitt

ISBN-13: 978 0 00 878134 7

Publisher: 4th Estate

Guideline Price: £18.99; 256pp

The Vietnam War still haunts the American psyche. Did you earn your spurs by signing up or did you dodge the draft via a bony bump on the ankle, a very different type of spur? That’s a variant on the existential dilemma facing Lee Clarke, the anti-hero of Patrick deWitt’s fine new novel, his sixth. Lee heads for Canada, pressed, as his oracular Uncle Wallace concludes, “to accept that which you could not accept, and you did not accept …”

Lee, a one-time student of land surveying at UCLA, is a soul brother to Kafka’s K caught in similar thrall to the state, his problem being army inclusion as opposed to castle exclusion. He journeys across America from west to east, “Manifest Destiny in reverse”, steering a spanking-new racing green E-type Jaguar, a drive-away deal, intent on saying goodbye to his extended family.

Dodge City is thus a road novel where the amphetamine-fuelled Lee is quite devoid of Kerouac’s frenzied optimism. Lee’s journey is meant to have “no egregious zigzags”, his route as smoothly unidirectional as deWitt’s prose, a flowing style we might laud as one the most unhindered, the most freely rheological, in fiction writing today.

Dialogue is deWitt’s strength – the rushed cascades of conversations between Lee and Grace, his twin sister, have an impressive swing and swirl. Lee’s encounters with his divorced parents and his elder brother – “degraded to the point of redoubtability” – are turbulent, laden with all the confused eddies and obfuscations, misunderstandings and minor maelstroms that typify family life.

There’s also a Death Valley dryness to deWitt’s ironies as when Lee faces his recruitment officer. The authorities tell him straight-faced that a “preexisting inclination toward violent behaviors is actually a strike against a young man hoping for a place in the armed forces”.

Dodge City is an exemplary account of why some men choose to enlist and why others walk away. This is a wise novel that restores your faith in North American decency, containing, as it does, the best insult you’ll hear all year: a doctor described as a “chinless slope-shouldered, jiggle-titted peeve”.