‘People do suffer from weirdness’: Canadian author Patrick deWitt reinvents the comedy of manners

Slate magazine has called Patrick deWitt “the great chronicler of American weirdos.”

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It’s an intriguing label to apply to a writer born on Vancouver Island who loyally retains his Canadian citizenship. But you can understand the reason. After all, deWitt’s breakout novel, the 2011 Booker-nominated The Sisters Brothers, turned the conventions of the western on their ear with its subversively funny account of two neurotic hitmen on the loose during the 1846 California gold rush.

If you ask the 51-year-old author now about this weirdo thing, you get an unruffled, low-key response.

“I can’t imagine writing about a character who had no issues and no problems,” he says. “I like characters who are maybe struggling a little bit more than normal. People do suffer from weirdness, you know, and I have an actual affection for them.”

Hence, deWitt’s new novel, Dodge City, is predictably alert to the bizarre realities of human behaviour. For example, we don’t feel that we’re entering fantasyland when we arrive at an oddball portrait of an aging dogcatcher who resorts to highly unorthodox methods to keep his job. Such scenes are laced with deWitt’s trademark humour — but they’re accompanied by a tenderness and warmth that’s characteristic of deWitt’s zest for pulling off tricky balancing acts in his fiction. He can be a breeze to read: to write about him is more complicated. Peel away one layer and there’s another to confound you. When it comes to his literary credentials, a thoroughly contemporary sensibility finds nurture in the past. Go figure.

DeWitt’s originality and sheer pleasurability as a writer have won him a devoted following, and Dodge City, his sixth novel, again shows why.
Set in the late 1960s, an era when America was tearing itself apart over the Vietnam War, it chronicles the fortunes and misfortunes of a draft-dodging university dropout named Lee Clarke as he embarks on an emotionally precarious journey from California to the East Coast and the eventual safety of the Canadian border. It’s indicative of deWitt’s mischievous liking for incongruity that he puts Lee, not behind the wheel of some rattletrap vehicle, but improbably in a spanking new Jaguar — and the reason is a story in itself.

“I have a weakness for road novels,” deWitt says on the phone from his home in Oregon. “I just started thinking about the mindset of the road traveller driving across these great expanses. And there’s also family history tied up in this book. My father was a draft dodger, born in Ontario but living in California when he got his draft notice — so he drove back to Canada. Also, I had never written about the Sixties, and it’s a decade I find fascinating.”

Initially, he didn’t expect to be writing a novel with relevance to today’s chaos south of the border.

“I think there’s a through line to our contemporary moment — it’s something I became aware of midway through writing the book. But the players now are perhaps more degraded, more covertly sinister and dangerous — that’s how it feels.”

DeWitt’s subtly stylized writing voice is present in Dodge City. So is his readiness to temper absurdity with poignancy: the draft-dodging Lee is no idealized protagonist, not when he’s still in emotional knots over the girlfriend he has left behind and fuelling his odyssey with amphetamines instead of food.

On his way to Canada, Lee needs to visit members of his fractured family and say goodbye. The result is a set of variations — roaringly funny, wrenchingly sad in examining the ties that bind us — as Lee, definitely a mess himself, drops in on his hyper mum, the dodgy brother from whom he’s been estranged for years, his glorious dingbat of a twin sister, and the forlorn dogcatcher who also happens to be Lee’s disintegrating dad.

“I like characters who are maybe struggling a little bit more than normal.

“The comedy comes about naturally and sometimes I overdo it and have to pull back,” says deWitt, a two-time winner of Canada’s Leacock Medal for Humour.“It comes so easily to me — the impulse for humour — so the way it goes has me pulling back on it until the book is finished. It has to be more than a gag — it’s not just there to make somebody laugh or smile but to serve some other purpose.”

DeWitt has been bailed as a refreshing new presence on the literary scene. But he’s also entirely comfortable to be identified with a form that has distinctly old-fashioned vibes — the comedy of manners. “It’s absolutely a part of the mix. It’s one of the many influences that’s part of the writer I am.”

Early in Dodge City, Lee’s frantic effort to avoid the draft leads him to an encounter with government officialdom that reads like a nightmarish blend of Franz Kafka and Monty Python, both of whom deWitt acknowledges as creative influences, along with such other startling examples from the past as legendary satirists Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, playwright Noel Coward, Barbara Pym, revered for her middle-class social comedy, and perhaps most significantly — Ivy Compton-Burnett.

Compton-Burnett’s fiercely uncompromising eviscerations of Britain’s Edwardian and late Victorian middle class were written almost entirely in character-defining dialogue, and in her deWitt finds a kindred spirit. He has his own exhilarating way with conversations, and is capable of riffs worthy of Quentin Tarantino — yet he finds inspiration for this gift in the writings of an eccentric spinster born in 1885.

Compton-Burnett avoided descriptive passages almost entirely, but deWitt doesn’t think he could manage this feat himself. “I admire her for being able to pull it off over and over, but it would be too strict an exercise for me. She’s a much more severe artist than I am. But I do love writing conversation very much. Everything comes to life.”

Meanwhile, he makes no predictions about what readers will take away from Dodge City.

“I would rather they find out for themselves. I think that fiction is collaborative — a book may reach out to you and also to me, but it won’t be the same experience, Some people read my works and don’t see any humour at all — they see them as drama. That may seem confusing, but it’s not wrong.”

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