‘People do experience weirdness’: Canadian author Patrick deWitt transforms the funny of good manners

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Slate magazine has called Patrick deWitt “the great chronicler of American weirdos.”

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It’s an intriguing label to apply to a writer born on Vancouver Island who loyally retains his Canadian citizenship. But you can understand the 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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If you ask the 51-year-old author now about this weirdo thing, you get an unruffled, low-key response.

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“I can’t imagine writing about a character who had no issues and no problems,” he says. “I like characters who are maybe struggling a little bit more than normal. People do suffer from weirdness, you know, and I have an actual affection for them.”

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Hence, deWitt’s new novel, Dodge City, is predictably alert to the bizarre realities of human behaviour. 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. 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. He can be a breeze to read: to write about him is more complicated. Peel away one layer and there’s another to confound you. When it comes to his literary credentials, a thoroughly contemporary sensibility finds nurture in the past. Go figure.

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DeWitt’s creativity and large pleasurability as an author have actually won him a dedicated following, and Dodge City, his 6th book, once again reveals why.
Embed in the late 1960s, an age when America was tearing itself apart over the Vietnam War, it narrates the fortunes and miseries of a draft-dodging university dropout called Lee Clarke as he starts a mentally precarious journey from California to the East Coast and the ultimate security of the Canadian border. It’s a sign of deWitt’s naughty preference for incongruity that he puts Lee, not behind the wheel of some rattletrap automobile, however unbelievably in a spanking brand-new Jaguar– and the factor is a story in itself.

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“I have a weak point for roadway books,” deWitt states on the phone from his home in Oregon.” I simply began considering the state of mind of the roadway tourist driving throughout these excellent stretches. And there’s likewise household history bound in this book. My dad was a draft dodger, born in Ontario however residing in California when he got his draft notification– so he drove back to Canada. I had actually never ever composed about the Sixties, and it’s a years I discover interesting.”

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He didn’t anticipate to be composing an unique with importance to today’s turmoil south of the border.

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“I believe there’s a through line to our modern minute– it’s something I ended up being conscious of midway through composing the book. The gamers now are maybe more abject, more discreetly ominous and harmful– that’s how it feels.”

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DeWitt’s discreetly elegant composing voice exists in Dodge City. Is his preparedness to temper absurdity with poignancy: the draft-dodging Lee is no idealized lead character, not when he’s still in psychological knots over the sweetheart he has actually left behind and sustaining his odyssey with amphetamines rather of food.