Patrick deWitt's Dodge City Reinvents the Road Novel

Patrick deWitt, who broke through with the 2011 Booker-shortlisted western The Sisters Brothers, has taken on another hallowed American genre: the road novel. Dodge City, his new book, follows a 1960s college dropout driving across the United States to avoid being sent to Vietnam.

A short précis — a cross-country journey undertaken by a UCLA dropout armed only with a bag of amphetamines — makes the book sound like an Easy Rider tribute. It is typical, the review notes, for deWitt's novels to be compared to films rather than other books. But in this case, something very different transpires.

The novel opens with the 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 does not consider himself a conscientious objector. That, he reasons, would be only another form of heroism, and "the myth of the hero is at the heart of my critique of the entire exercise." But neither does he want to go to Vietnam. He decides to dodge — to head to Canada.

DeWitt sets his story apart from recent entries in the genre. Works by Miranda July and Ben Markovits have used the road trip, in very different ways, to dramatise midlife crisis. Dodge City returns the genre to its roots: the 1960s, and youth as opposed to middle age. As befits a writer who is, in so many ways, a throwback, deWitt commits the novel to both readerly pleasure and literary artifice.

The book also carries an accidental sting for contemporary readers. Younger readers, the review observes, may note with envy that being kicked out of college mattered a lot less when you were not tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.

With Dodge City, deWitt continues the pattern of his career: raiding classic American forms — the western, now the road novel — and reshaping them into something that resists the easy cinematic comparison his books usually invite.