DeWitt's 'Dodge City': A Tender Vietnam-Era Road Trip — SkimNews
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- Patrick deWitt publishes "Dodge City," a road novel about Leland "Lee" Clarke, expelled from UCLA for one-punching a rich hippy — a friend's assault that costs him his draft deferment — prompting him to flee to Canada rather than serve in Vietnam
- Unlike recent road novels by Miranda July and Ben Markovits, which dramatize midlife crisis, the reviewer positions Dodge City as a throwback to 1960s youth-rooted road-trip fiction, though subverting Easy Rider expectations by centering Lee's relationship with his past rather than present liberation
- Lee funds an L-shaped journey from Los Angeles to New Jersey — visiting his father in Concrete, Washington; mother in Montana; sister in Manhattan — by selling his car and signing up for a drive-away service to deliver a brand-new Jaguar E-Type
- The reviewer highlights deWitt's idiosyncratic prose style — puns, archaisms, passive voice, preference for Latin over Anglo-Saxon verbs — as a violation of current MFA norms, comparing his arch dialogue to Ivy Compton-Burnett
- Lee is described as belonging to the "Hans Castorp school of hero" — "perfectly ordinary, if engaging" — recalling Thomas Mann's protagonist from The Magic Mountain
- The review frames Dodge City as evidence of deWitt's artistic evolution: more contemplative and tender than his rambunctious Booker-shortlisted 2011 western The Sisters Brothers, with settings growing "realer" and feelings "softer"
Why it matters: DeWitt — a high-school dropout with no MFA who built a commercial literary-fiction career — releases a new novel that the reviewer identifies as a notable tonal shift toward tenderness, distinguishing him from peers like Miranda July and Ben Markovits while solidifying his position as a stylist working outside industry conventions.
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