Patrick deWitt’s Dodge City is a novel about a young man Lee Clarke in 1967, Los Angeles, on an amphetamine-fuelled cross-country road trip, fleeing the draft for the safe haven of Canada. He 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 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 dogcatcher and a World War II veteran in a state of degradation, his mother, a resident since her divorce in her native Montana, engaged in a buoyantly manic and never-ending performance with her shut-in sibling; his heartbroken, misanthropic brother, Harry; in Duluth, Minnesota, who is getting over a broken heart by terrorising the town with fake bomb threats, and finally his twin sister, Grace, a brash, young New York nurse-in-training mired in romantic drama at a Manhattan psychiatric hospital.
Of the 27 million Americans eligible for the Vietnam draft, fewer than a tenth ever got into uniform, as most evaded it on health grounds or because they were in college education, some by conscientious objection others as many as 100, 000 avoided by fleeing the country. The lucky ones never received a draft notice at all. When Lee complained to his draft officer, his argument that his country is asking too much of him is given a short shrift: he is to report for his physical in two weeks. So he packs a suitcase, breaks up with his girlfriend, and makes by a rather circuitous, west-to-east coast route, for Canada.
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 humourist, who never shies from the stranger aspects of human behaviour.
Dodge City doesn’t capture the spirit of the time. Another perfect little detail is the “still soft” piece of bubble gum attaching his girlfriend’s goodbye note to his front door. deWitt does not go in for character interiority- a common criticism of his work is its emotional detachment- Lee’s poking of the gum makes his feelings clear enough. We share his heartbereak.
Dodge City by Patrick deWitt, Fourth Estate £18.99/ Ecco $28, 256 pages.
