Dodge City - by Patrick DeWitt (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

From bestselling author Patrick deWitt comes Dodge City, a rollicking novel about a young man on an amphetamine-fueled cross-country road trip, fleeing the draft for the safe haven of Canada.

It's 1967 in Los Angeles and Lee Clarke has received his draft notice, calling him up to fight in the Vietnam War. A straitlaced, apolitical twenty-three-year-old from Concrete, Washington, Lee is studying at UCLA until a fistfight leads to his expulsion--and his removal from the deferment list. The draft notice forces him to make the first political decision of his life, and though he's happy in California and loves his girlfriend, he will leave the country and head for the border.

He signs up at a drive-away car-delivery service, chancing into a showroom-new Jaguar bound for the East Coast. Bringing only a single suitcase and a bag of amphetamines, he makes his stimulated progress against the width of the country, pining for the life he's left behind and wondering what his decision will mean for his future.

But he is not just saying goodbye to the country of his birth. In four different towns strung out along the northern United States, Lee visits each member of his immediate family: his father, a World War II veteran in a state of degradation; his mother, engaged in a buoyantly manic and never-ending performance with her shut-in sibling; his heartbroken, misanthropic brother, Harry; and finally his twin sister, Grace, a brash, young nurse-in-training mired in romantic drama at a Manhattan psychiatric hospital.

An arresting portrait of a country in flux and a family in disarray, Dodge City represents a signal achievement in an already illustrious body of work by the "twenty-first-century Mark Twain" (Slate). Witty, moving, and delightfully off-kilter, Patrick deWitt's sixth novel is a brilliant and raucous exploration of family, country, division, and war, from an elegant humorist who never shies from the stranger aspects of human behavior.

Review Quotes

"Keenly observed and wryly humorous. . . DeWitt draws each character as comically absurd, yet he makes each portrait feel strangely poignant. . . DeWitt's elegiac novel is good company for dark days."

- Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

"Blessed with deWitt's lively, clipped, and surprising dialogue. . . [A] hero's journey that interrogates the very meaning of life." - Booklist

"Funny, warm-hearted, and beautifully written." - The Times ("40 Books Not to Miss this Autumn")

"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

"All Patrick deWitt's books are exquisite company, but Dodge City feels like an especially fine and honorable acquaintance to have made. I adored every page of this wise, funny, charming novel." - Max Porter, author of Shy and Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

"A witty, heartfelt ride. Dodge City is a supreme delight." - Jami Attenberg, author of A Reason to See You Again and The Middlesteins