Canadian author Patrick deWitt broke through with a western, 2011’s Booker-shortlisted The Sisters Brothers. Now, he has taken on another hallowed American genre: the road novel. Recent works by Miranda July and Ben Markovits have, in very different ways, used the idea of the road trip as a way to dramatise midlife crisis. As befits a writer who is, in so many ways, a throwback, Dodge City returns the genre to its roots: the 1960s, and youth as opposed to middle age. A short précis – a cross-country journey undertaken by a UCLA drop-out armed only with a bag of amphetamines – makes the book sound like an Easy Rider tribute. It is typical for deWitt novels to be compared to films rather than other books. But in this case, something very different transpires.
The novel opens with our protagonist, Leland “Lee” Clarke, receiving his draft notice – he is to be sent to Vietnam. He has just been expelled from UCLA for assaulting a fellow student, a rich hippy who condescends to him. This “event of violence” (a “one-punch wonder”, as Lee’s father calls it) costs him his draft deferment. Lee doesn’t consider himself a conscientious objector – that is only another form of heroism, and “the myth of the hero is at the heart of my critique of the entire exercise”. But nor does he want to go to Vietnam. He decides, instead, to dodge – to head to Canada. Younger readers may note with envy that being kicked out of college mattered a lot less when you weren’t tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.
