Dodge City

It’s 1967 in Los Angeles and Lee Clarke has received his draft notice, calling him up to fight in the Vietnam War. A strait-laced, apolitical twenty-three-year-old from Concrete, Washington, Lee is studying at UCLA until a fistfight leads to his expulsion – as well as his removal from the deferment list. The draft notice forces Lee to make the first political decision of his life; and though he’s happy in California, and loves his girlfriend, he will leave the country and head for the border.

He signs up at a drive-away car delivery service, chancing into a showroom-new Jaguar bound for the East Coast. Bringing only a single suitcase and a bag of amphetamines, he makes his stimulated progress against the width of the country, pining for the life he’s left behind, and wondering what his decision will mean for his future.

But he is not just saying goodbye to the country of his birth. In four different towns strung out along the northern United States, Lee visits each member of his immediate family: his father, a World War Two veteran in a state of degradation; his mother, engaged in a buoyantly manic and never-ending performance with her shut-in sibling; his heartbroken, misanthropic brother Harry; and finally his twin sister Grace, a brash, young nurse-in-training mired in romantic drama at a Manhattan psychiatric hospital.

An arresting portrait of a country in flux and a family in disarray, Dodge City represents a signal achievement in an already illustrious body of work by the '21st-century Mark Twain' (Slate). Witty, moving and delightfully off-kilter, deWitt’s sixth novel is a brilliant and raucous exploration of family, country, division and war, from an elegant humorist who never shies from the stranger aspects of human behaviour.