Editorial Content for Dodge City

DODGE CITY, Patrick deWitt’s wryly observant new novel, begins when an unwelcome and unexpected draft notice slips through Lee Clarke’s mail slot one “neutral, blinding day in Southern California.”

Lee has expected to avoid military service. Until recently, he’d been enrolled at UCLA, but he was expelled after what he calls “an event of violence.” (He punched an annoying and self-satisfied fellow student, who unfortunately happened to be the son of a major donor.) He planned to enroll in community college to maintain his deferment, but unfortunately, “the machine moved with superior speed.”

Now, Lee is staring down a stint in Vietnam and realizing he very much does not want to die for his country. Nor does he want to leave his beautiful but emotionally distant girlfriend, Cal. Like a stray cat, she drifts in and out of his life without explanation.

"The Vietnam War and its particular moral quandaries might be long over, but for those struggling to make sense of our current baffling present, deWitt’s portrait of a man trying to navigate his own untenable and confusing reality will resonate."

With his induction date looming, Lee considers his options. Faking insanity or homosexuality won’t work --- he knows he can’t “muster one of these life or death performances.” It’s too late for marriage, and he dismisses the idea of conscientious objection out of hand. Conversations with his draft officer are amusingly Kafka-esque; clearly, there’s no relief to be found in impersonal bureaucracy. Fleeing to Canada seems to be the only choice. Lee lands a gig with a driveway car delivery company, hired to pilot a pristine Jaguar from the West Coast to New Jersey. 

Thus begins Lee’s chaotic, revealing, often funny and amphetamine-fueled journey across the United States. His ultimate plan is to cross the Canadian border somewhere north of New York City. But before then, he has a few loose ends to tie up, including a stop in his hometown of Concrete, Washington (a place as depressing as it sounds) to see his alcoholic father, as well as visits with his mother and uncle in Montana, his estranged older brother in Duluth, and his twin sister in New York City.

Lee’s trip turns out to be as entertaining, and at times sobering, as it is illuminating. He finds his father living in squalor and dognapping other people’s pets in order to meet his quota as a dog catcher. His mother --- who speaks in an oddly formal register and abruptly fled the family when he was a teen --- is living a strange and isolated (though not unhappy) life with her “eccentric” sibling. Lee’s brother, Harry, is calling in bomb threats for kicks when he’s not getting drunk at the local dive, while Grace is a psychiatric nurse in training having affairs with both her boss and a patient. 

Lee the draft dodger comes off as positively stable and rational in this family of misfits. With everyone else’s life cracking up and the country itself falling apart, ditching America altogether makes more and more sense. But Lee can’t shake the feeling that he’s leaving something behind, namely the enigmatic Cal. Is he lusting after a phantom, or is there real love there? It’s hard to say.

The characters and situations that Lee encounters on his picaresque journey are both absurd and moving. The abrupt end of his parents’ marriage is a study in midcentury lower-middle-class malaise. His clever mother reaches her breaking point after years of a stifling, loveless relationship, while his father still can’t figure out why she left. “I thought we were on the same page,” he says. A member of the antiwar movement urges Lee to join a different kind of army, trying to conscript him into a life of protests and pamphleteering. “Are you cool?” he asks after he makes his pitch. “I don’t think I am cool, no,” Lee replies.

The cause might be just, but it’s not for Lee, whose objection to the war is more personal than political. Soon after, he’s contemplating the “vulgar bounty” of an automat, but what he really wants is to be back in his quiet apartment in Venice with Cal, where “a pleasing sadness…came into the air when it rained” and the world outside could be ignored for a little while. The Vietnam War and its particular moral quandaries might be long over, but for those struggling to make sense of our current baffling present, deWitt’s portrait of a man trying to navigate his own untenable and confusing reality will resonate.