Book Review: Patrick deWitt’s mastery as a writer is revealed in Giller-nominated Dodge City

While Patrick deWitt’s new offering, Dodge City, contains elements of the classic road novel, it also confidently subverts others. Protagonist Lee Clarke, sets off on a trip that’s less about quest and more about amplifying a choice, standing still with your decision, even as you give yourself over to the existential inevitabilities of the journey.

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The reader, calling shotgun, is along for the ride, and the effect is like a summer-night’s drive, windows down, the way it used to be, no seatbelts, no judgments, feet on the dashboard, somebody’s smoking, and all around you, the scent of tobacco and clover, the noise of insects and low-grade music, headlights illuminating “the endless blip of the world’s white lines.”

Dodge City, longlisted for the Giller, feels like a lived experience.

The Canadian author’s immaculately crafted sixth novel, is a tender story that begins in 1967, when Lee, 23, a broke, small-town expat, kind of in love, kind of happy, while navigating a new sunlit life in L.A., coolly punches out some rich kid who’s got it coming and gets expelled from UCLA. Soon after, he gets drafted, and confronted with the “lunatic reality” of the induction office, decides to flee to Canada rather than fight in Vietnam — this is fight and flight of a different sort.

Dodge City is built on the sturdy scaffold of its irresistible leading man, described by his intellectually “arcane” girlfriend, Cal, as a “patrician redneck,” who possessed the “raw materials to be whatever stripe of man he wanted to be.”

Lee’s nothing, if not himself. A good sport and a generous thinker and listener, with an easy but analytical world view, he signs on to deliver a new Jaguar to its owner, driving from L.A. to the East Coast. Fuelled by amphetamines, called white crosses, (all those illicit signifiers of dead soldiers keeping him awake), he makes multiple stops to see his divorced parents, uncle and two siblings, before disappearing into the unknown that is Canada.

Like Lee, every family member is tethered to their own decision-making; each is someone who could be more; not that they settled for less, but rather, they settled for themselves. The best and worst fate.

Dewitt’s known for his oddball characters, and his talent for tilting sideways, which doesn’t negate the idea that to be human, is to be eccentric. In Dodge City, deWitt recruits all that raw incoming humanity, and reimagines its intensity using heightened dialogue, sly and profound insights, incisive understatement and dark wit to create characters who operate within their own borders, “the untouchable piece of oneself that must not be encroached upon.”

Lee, more than his family, intuits the value in expanding those borders. The same can be said about deWitt’s subtly tentacled and layered prose.

Dodge City gives full voice to deWitt’s mastery as a writer, the mystery of his language, its inherent vision, how he only appears to operate on the calm surface of things, people and events. In Dodge City, his prose glides on water as a way of plumbing the depths. It’s like wading at the shoreline only to emerge feeling as if you’ve touched the seabed.

He gives us these unexpected moments, grace notes throughout: When Lee was alone with his draft notice in his apartment, he read it through several times, then he “moved to the window, to look out at the ocean, as people like to do in times of strife.”

That passage is on page three, the beginning of the story, the author hinting at who he is. The ending, though, confirms suspicions. At heart, deWitt is a poet.

Elizabeth Kelly is the author of Apologize, Apologize!, The Last Summer of the Camperdowns and The Miracle on Monhegan Island.

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