‘People do suffer from weirdness’: Canadian author Patrick deWitt reinvents the comedy of manners

Author Patrick deWitt can be as serious as he is low-key funny. Ray Bidegain

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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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Dodge City by Patrick deWitt. House of Anansi

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DeWitt’s originality and sheer pleasurability as a writer have won him a devoted following, and Dodge City, his sixth novel, again shows why.
Set in the late 1960s, an era when America was tearing itself apart over the Vietnam War, it chronicles the fortunes and misfortunes of a draft-dodging university dropout named Lee Clarke as he embarks on an emotionally precarious journey from California to the East Coast and the eventual safety of the Canadian border. It’s indicative of deWitt’s mischievous liking for incongruity that he puts Lee, not behind the wheel of some rattletrap vehicle, but improbably in a spanking new Jaguar — and the reason is a story in itself.

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“I have a weakness for road novels,” deWitt says on the phone from his home in Oregon. “I just started thinking about the mindset of the road traveller driving across these great expanses. And there’s also family history tied up in this book. My father was a draft dodger, born in Ontario but living in California when he got his draft notice — so he drove back to Canada. Also, I had never written about the Sixties, and it’s a decade I find fascinating.”

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Initially, he didn’t expect to be writing a novel with relevance to today’s chaos south of the border.

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“I think there’s a through line to our contemporary moment — it’s something I became aware of midway through writing the book. But the players now are perhaps more degraded, more covertly sinister and dangerous — that’s how it feels.”

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DeWitt’s subtly stylized writing voice is present in Dodge City. So is his readiness to temper absurdity with poignancy: the draft-dodging Lee is no idealized protagonist, not when he’s still in emotional knots over the girlfriend he has left behind and fuelling his odyssey with amphetamines instead of food.