Slate magazine has called Patrick deWitt “the great chronicler of American weirdos.”
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magazine → call → weirdos
It’s an intriguing label to apply to a writer born on Vancouver Island who loyally retains his Canadian citizenship.
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who → ’ → citizenship
But you can understand the reason.
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you → understand → 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.
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novel → nominate → rush
If you ask the 51-year-old author now about this weirdo thing, you get an unruffled, low-key response.
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you → ask → response
“I can’t imagine writing about a character who had no issues and no problems,” he says.
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he → imagine → issues
“I like characters who are maybe struggling a little bit more than normal.
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who → like → characters
People do suffer from weirdness, you know, and I have an actual affection for them.”
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I → suffer → them
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.
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who → feel → 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.
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that → lace → fiction
He can be a breeze to read: to write about him is more complicated.
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write → read → him
When it comes to his literary credentials, a thoroughly contemporary sensibility finds nurture in the past.
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sensibility → come → past
DeWitt’s originality and sheer pleasurability as a writer have won him a devoted following, and Dodge City, his sixth novel, again shows why.
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City → win → following
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.
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he → Set → 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.
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deWitt → ’ → Oregon
“I just started thinking about the mindset of the road traveller driving across these great expanses.
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I → start → expanses
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.
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he → bear → Canada
Also, I had never written about the Sixties, and it’s a decade I find fascinating.”
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I → write → Sixties
Initially, he didn’t expect to be writing a novel with relevance to today’s chaos south of the border.
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he → expect → border
“I think there’s a through line to our contemporary moment — it’s something I became aware of midway through writing the book.
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I → think → book
But the players now are perhaps more degraded, more covertly sinister and dangerous — that’s how it feels.”
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it → ’ → ?
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.
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he → temper → amphetamines
On his way to Canada, Lee needs to visit members of his fractured family and say goodbye.
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Lee → need → family
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.
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who → examine → sister
“I like characters who are maybe struggling a little bit more than normal.
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who → like → characters
“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.
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deWitt → come → 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.
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book → come → it
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.”
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somebody → have → purpose
DeWitt has been bailed as a refreshing new presence on the literary scene.
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DeWitt → bail → scene
But he’s also entirely comfortable to be identified with a form that has distinctly old-fashioned vibes — the comedy of manners.
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that → ’ → manners
“It’s absolutely a part of the mix.
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It → ’ → mix
It’s one of the many influences that’s part of the writer I am.”
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I → ’ → writer
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.
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deWitt → avoid → comedy
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.
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deWitt → write → 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.
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he → have → 1885
Compton-Burnett avoided descriptive passages almost entirely, but deWitt doesn’t think he could manage this feat himself.
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he → avoid → feat
“I admire her for being able to pull it off over and over, but it would be too strict an exercise for me.
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it → admire → me
She’s a much more severe artist than I am.
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I → ’ → ?
But I do love writing conversation very much.
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I → love → conversation
Everything comes to life.”
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Everything → come → life
…and 5 more, not listed.
The Aporia
