Dodge City

‘A perfect novel … on the knife’s edge of hilarity and tenderness’ JONATHAN LETHEM

From the Booker-shortlisted author of The Sisters Brothers comes Dodge City, a thrilling novel about a young man on an amphetamine fuelled cross-country road trip fleeing the Vietnam draft.

1967, California. Lee Clarke is a strait-laced twenty-three-year-old, happily in love and ambling along at college until an ill-advised fistfight leads to his expulsion. Soon, he receives his draft notice to serve in the Vietnam War, which forces Lee to make the first political decision of his life: he will leave the country and his girlfriend and head for the Canadian border.

He signs up at a drive-away car delivery service, chancing into a new Jaguar bound for the East Coast. Carrying only a single suitcase and a bag of amphetamines, Lee knows he can’t go without saying his goodbyes.

In four different towns strung out along the US, Lee visits each member of his family: his father, an alcoholic World War Two veteran; his mother, engaged in a buoyantly manic performance with her shut-in sibling; his heartbroken, misanthropic brother Harry; and finally his twin sister, Grace, a brash, young psychiatric nurse-in-training mired in romantic drama. As Lee makes his stimulated progress across the country, his past keeps rising to meet him. He can’t help but wonder, what will his decision to leave mean for his future?

A beautiful, sweeping and raucous portrait of a country in flux and a family in disarray, Dodge City confirms deWitt as one of our most brilliant satirists and a novelist of staggering heart.

Reviews

Praise for Dodge City:

‘Reader, I understand that I’m supposed to entice you with a comparison like “what if Hal Ashby directed a Charles Portis book” but what’s troubling me is that Dodge City appears to be an instance of a perfect novel, which by my account is a thing a novel is never allowed to be, especially one that is poised like this on the knife’s edge of hilarity and tenderness. So I’d better read it again and find some flaw and get back to you’ Jonathan Lethem, author of Brooklyn Crime Novel

Praise for Patrick deWitt:

‘The great chronicler of American weirdos’ Slate

‘DeWitt's particular comic genius is to evoke the darkness behind the dazzle … whichever style he adopts or genre he inhabits, deWitt remains a true original’ Guardian

‘One of the great literary ventriloquists, producing funny, quirky, richly imagined novels shaped each time by a wildly different narrative voice’ Daily Mail

‘DeWitt is a true original, conjuring up dark and hilarious images’ The Times

‘DeWitt's great gift lies in his ability to depict the Everyman in extremis – heroism hidden in plain sight’ Telegraph

‘Patrick deWitt is an artful ventriloquist … a distinctive and utterly beguiling voice’ Metro

‘A fresh, lively voice that surprises at every turn’ Kate Atkinson, author of Transcription

‘Like Flannery O'Connor shot through with the Coen brothers’ Andrew O'Hagan, author of Caledonian Road