Patrick DeWitt for Dodge City
Thursday 12th November, 7pm
Pilrig St. Paul's / LARCH, Leith Walk, Edinburgh EH6 5AH
6.30pm
7pm
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.
'A perfect novel ... on the knife's edge of hilarity and tenderness' Jonathan Lethem, author of The Fortress of Solitude
'Like Flannery O'Connor shot through with the Coen brothers' Andrew O'Hagan, author of Caledonian Road
'The great chronicler of American weirdos' Slate
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.
Patrick deWitt is the author of five novels including The Sisters Brothers, which won the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, the Governor General Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2011. Born in British Columbia, Canada, he now resides in Portland, Oregon.