Dodge City is the new novel from Patrick deWitt, the author of The Sisters Brothers and French Exit. It is a road story set in 1967, and a wry, warm-hearted look at family and the lengths a young man will go to avoid a war.
Lee Clarke is twenty-three, straitlaced and freshly expelled from UCLA. That loses him his student deferment, and the Vietnam draft notice arrives soon after. Rather than report, he sets off across the country toward the Canadian border, stopping to see each member of his scattered family along the way. What follows is a comic, tender account of evasion, growing up, and the people we come from.
Written with deWitt's deadpan humour and his eye for the odd and the human.
For readers of deWitt's own The Sisters Brothers, and of Richard Russo and Charles Portis.
