Dodge City
Patrick deWitt
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From the publisher
From the Booker-shortlisted author of The Sisters Brothers comes a thrilling novel about a young man on an amphetamine-fuelled cross-country road trip fleeing the Vietnam draft. 1967, California. Lee Clarke is a strait-laced twenty-three-year-old, happily in love and ambling along at college until an ill-advised fistfight leads to his expulsion.
Soon, he receives his draft notice to serve in the Vietnam War, which forces Lee to make the first political decision of his life: he will leave the country and his girlfriend and head for the Canadian border. He signs up at a drive-away car delivery service, chancing into a new Jaguar bound for the East Coast. Carrying only a single suitcase and a bag of amphetamines, Lee knows he can’t go without saying his goodbyes.
In four different towns strung out along the US, Lee visits each member of his family: his father, an alcoholic World War Two veteran; his mother, engaged in a buoyantly manic performance with her shut-in sibling; his heartbroken, misanthropic brother Harry; and finally his twin sister, Grace, a brash, young psychiatric nurse-in-training mired in romantic drama. As Lee makes his stimulated progress across the country, his past keeps rising to meet him. He can’t help but wonder, what will his decision to leave mean for his future? A beautiful, sweeping and raucous portrait of a family in disarray and a country in flux, Dodge City confirms deWitt as one of our most brilliant satirists and a novelist of staggering heart.