Patrick deWitt’s latest novel, “Dodge City,” centers around something the author knows well: a road trip.
The one that protagonist Lee Clarke takes in the book isn’t a joyride, though. The 23-year-old has been expelled from UCLA for punching another young man, meaning his Vietnam War draft deferment has gone by the wayside. When he gets his draft notice in the mail, he decides he has no choice but to try to make it to Canada.
He takes the long way north, stopping to visit his father, brother, mother, and twin sister, all of whom live in different towns and are battling their own demons.
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Part of the inspiration for the novel, which has been longlisted for the Giller Prize — Canada’s most prestigious literary award — was deWitt’s own experiences on the road. The author, who was born on Vancouver Island, Canada, and raised in both British Columbia and Southern California, doesn’t like to stay in one place for long, although he now calls Portland, Oregon, home.
“I have been doing a lot of long-distance, solo road trips since my son has become grown,” deWitt says. “I can just ramble whenever I like. I’m always sort of looking for a reason to get in my car and start driving. Something happens to me when I’m driving long distances; I tend to work things out. Usually there’s a project underway that I can wrestle with as I go.”
It’s fitting that deWitt answered questions about “Dodge City,” out now from Ecco, from Los Angeles — the destination of his latest road trip. After this interview, he was planning to head north to Santa Barbara to spend the night.
“And then tomorrow night, I’m not really sure,” he says. “I tend to just wing it.”
This conversation has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
Q: How did you come to write a novel about a young man dodging the Vietnam draft?
A few different things brought me to the book. My father was a draft dodger, so he had a somewhat similar situation. He was Canadian-born, but he had dual citizenship, and he’d moved in his early 20s to Southern California from Ontario and was having more or less the time of his life. Then he was drafted and left the country, which led him to meeting my mother, who was in Canada. I didn’t want to necessarily tell my father’s story, and the protagonist is emphatically not my father. That was the very first inkling of what would later become the book. I’d never really written about the ’60s at length, and the ’60s are a fascinating decade for me.
I jumped into this book not quite knowing what was coming or what it would feel or look like. But then the characters began to come into focus, the protagonist and his girlfriend, and then his family members, one by one. I started out with a clearer intention to have a protagonist who was wrestling with the idea of whether or not he should go to Vietnam, but that sort of fell by the wayside pretty quickly and it became less a question of that and more just the logistics of working out the answer, which comes to Lee more or less immediately.
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Q: Were Lee’s visits to his family really just goodbyes, or do you think he wanted to reconnect with them?
I like the idea that they’re four unique set pieces that make up the bulk of the novel. Family history, nuances and complications of human relationships: These are all things that have always and will continue to fascinate me. My books are not really about any one thing other than human relationships.
The function of each of the four set pieces is to flesh out Lee’s relationship with each individual person, and whether or not they’ll have a future. I think with some he will and others he might not. I don’t know that he’ll be rushing to contact his father again anytime soon, for example, but he makes amends, of a sort, with his brother. I just wanted it to reflect the reality of human relationships, which are oftentimes unwieldy and uncomfortable and ugly, but also surprising.
Q: Lee is laconic, and speaks at times in an almost formal register. What went into crafting his voice in the novel?
I wanted him to be stoic. I didn’t want him to be too chatty. I wanted him to be somewhat of a 1950s-type man, a silent doer of things. I wasn’t looking for somebody flamboyant. I didn’t want him to be a great performer, and you learn about the contents of his mind or heart throughout the novel by what he doesn’t do and what he doesn’t say. I just enjoy that, which isn’t to say I don’t enjoy the opposite, because other protagonists of mine can’t stop talking: Frances Price, for example, in “French Exit,” but I wanted Lee to be more an observer than a participant, and it sort of clarifies that this draft notice is something that is happening to him and he’s just enduring its call.
Q: Is writing a book that’s heavy with dialogue like this one more difficult than ones where the characters don’t talk as much?
It depends. “The Sisters Brothers” was not easy to write, but it was easier than others because the two people who were talking throughout the entire book had so much to say to each other, which was just a bit of luck. I’m always looking for combinations of people in my work that will have lots to talk about. I gravitate towards dialogue because it fascinates me, and there is an innate energy to the exercise of chit-chat. I love a descriptive paragraph or page. That’s as important to me as dialogue, but I think that I’ll always gravitate towards verbal communication. There’s something to it that continues to fascinate.
Q: This is a very funny novel, but also has some profoundly sad moments. How do you manage to strike a balance between those two modes?
I think that I have an impulse to tell melancholic stories. Once it’s down and I’m looking at it, I do feel the need to bring some light to it. I find that if you amuse a reader with humor, you can tell them difficult truths, and it’s not as taxing as if you’re just relentlessly bleak. I’m interested in bad news in my own life. When I ask somebody how they’re doing, I actually want to know what’s wrong. Not that I’m a glutton for punishment, but the struggles of the individual are fascinating to me.
This is what my work is probably always going to focus on. I wouldn’t want to read a book where everyone’s in a great mood and everything’s going wonderfully, and I don’t know that anyone would. Drama is inherent to my work, but I struggle to bring it in its natural state. I want to sort of Trojan-horse the bad news in with some tap dancing.
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