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Dodge City: A Novel
Not yet published
Expected 29 Sep 26From bestselling author Patrick deWitt comes Dodge City, a rollicking novel about a young man on an amphetamine-fueled cross-country road trip, fleeing the draft for the safe haven of Canada.
It’s 1967 in Los Angeles and Lee Clarke has received his draft notice, calling him up to fight in the Vietnam War. A straitlaced, apolitical twenty-three-year-old from Concrete, Washington, Lee is studying at UCLA until a fistfight leads to his expulsion—and his removal from the deferment list. The draft notice forces him 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 his father, a World War II 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 “twenty-first-century Mark Twain” (Slate). Witty, moving, and delightfully off-kilter, Patrick 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 behavior.
It’s 1967 in Los Angeles and Lee Clarke has received his draft notice, calling him up to fight in the Vietnam War. A straitlaced, apolitical twenty-three-year-old from Concrete, Washington, Lee is studying at UCLA until a fistfight leads to his expulsion—and his removal from the deferment list. The draft notice forces him 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 his father, a World War II 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 “twenty-first-century Mark Twain” (Slate). Witty, moving, and delightfully off-kilter, Patrick 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 behavior.
Kindle Edition
Expected publication September 29, 2026
About the author
Patrick deWitt
23 books2,655 followersPatrick deWitt is the author of the novels French Exit (a national bestseller), The Sisters Brothers (a New York Times bestseller short-listed for the Booker Prize), and the critically acclaimed Undermajordomo Minor and Ablutions. Born in British Columbia, he now resides in Portland, Oregon.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
You had to be there.
Which is to say, the America of the late ’60s, when the country was rent by a war even more divisive than the one today and we were all being assailed nightly on the TV news by the ever-increasing body count from the quagmire which Life magazine brought to front-page attention with a special edition of pictures of all the American soldiers killed over there in a single week and, more immediately for me, an ROTC acquaintance of mine, his new bars freshly anointing his Army greens, lost his life almost as soon as he set foot over there and another acquaintance of mine, a fellow lieutenant in a noncombat specialty, also “made the ultimate sacrifice,” as it’s euphemistically put, in that distant place, and, literally on my doorstep, a high-strung college roommate of mine, perhaps the unlikeliest candidate ever for donning uniform, had to get up in the middle of the night to catch a train to Chicago for a draft physical, which fortunately and only rightly disqualified him for service for I forget exactly what medical reason.
Such was the tumultuous world into which Lee Clarke, the hapless protagonist of Patrick DeWitt’s unsettling but not humorless new novel, awakens on the day when he finds awaiting him in his mailbox his draft notice, which, he mentally remarks, with its “greeting” salutation lacking even a more welcoming “s” at the end of the word, was “intended to resound in the mind’s ear as the voice of a truth one could not ever get away from: artless, spare, with no trace of comradeship.”
This despite his having been given to think by his draft officer that even though he has lost his deferment after being expelled from school for fighting, some accommodation might be made were he to re-enroll at another school within a prescribed time.
A situation Lee looks to immediately set to rights, enrolling at another institution almost as soon as the communication arrives, but, alas, even with proof of school registration squarely in hand, he’s told by his draft officer, a Mr. Dewey, that while, yes, it’s “strange” that the Selective Service had come calling as soon as it did (though he won’t go so far as to acknowledge a mistake had been made), there’s nothing to be done about it, the “machinery” is far enough along that he’ll almost certainly have to suit up and, yes, no doubt end up in Vietnam.
Indeed, the whole ambience of Dewey’s office, with its “lone aesthetic gesture” being an image on the wall of a “heroic eagle, descending from above in what looked to be a rage of activated patriotism (with) talons … blood-dipped, a fresh kill in (its) immediate past,” is uninviting of any sentiment disinclined toward “patriotic gore,” to use a phrase.
No quarter, at any rate, to be found there, where a banner unfurled about the eagle’s lower body reading “to a man, free” would seem to leave as the only logical choice for Lee to head for Canada, an option greeted with varying reactions by his family members as he sets out on a final odyssey before doing whatever he will end up doing, the first stop being his divorced father, whom Lee had never admired but always liked and who has fallen on hard times, having been reduced to dog-catching.
And while he is not overtly hostile to Lee’s intention, he cannot in good faith embrace it, having, as he puts it, with his own military service in World War II, “paid his way” to “hold my head up in the “United States of America,” his service having come at a time when, as he puts it, conscientious objectors were viewed in the same category as child molesters and religious freaks.
No cutting and running then, he declares, casting such behavior – getting out of Dodge, as it were – as “your generation’s contribution to the culture.”
Less resistant to Lee’s stated intention is his sister, who is having issues of her own with an affair with a married doctor, and his mother, whose abandonment of her marriage was what set his father on his downward course – “the cord connecting him to his duties was severed,” notes Lee in Robert Stone-like prose, and “his devolution commenced” – and in particular her brother, with whom she has been staying, and who among the family is most approving of Lee’s look northward for sanctuary, his greeting to Lee being to ask if he is “feeling waves of great bitterness at the lunatic machinery of mankind pulling you into its grim mechanisms in opposition to your wishes and against the common-sense morals of mother nature.”
Indeed, he finds Lee’s likely course of action a “romantic crime” -- “freedom at all costs and hang the consequences!”
A disquisition of sorts on war and patriotism, then, DeWitt’s novel, and delivered, as I say, in Robert Stone-like prose, making for a particularly absorbing read for me, with my own background, and coming at a time when, speaking of lunacy, the current holder of the nation’s highest office, without ever having served a day himself in uniform, indeed having used the available medical stratagems of the day to avoid it, has been banging the drums of war while professing no understanding of why service members would give their lives for something greater than themselves and even moved to prosecute veterans solely for advocating that soldiers not follow the sort of illegal orders that, to cite an especially egregious and relevant instance, made for the massacre at My Lai, which author William Styron cited as a symbol of the “moral degeneracy and criminal nature” of the Vietnam war.
Quite the thing to come to age on, at any rate, that fractured time, for me as well as Lee, and ably reconstructed in DeWitt’s fine novel, with its only possible fault for me being its conclusion, even if right offhand I can’t think what would have made for a more satisfying ending for me.
Which is to say, the America of the late ’60s, when the country was rent by a war even more divisive than the one today and we were all being assailed nightly on the TV news by the ever-increasing body count from the quagmire which Life magazine brought to front-page attention with a special edition of pictures of all the American soldiers killed over there in a single week and, more immediately for me, an ROTC acquaintance of mine, his new bars freshly anointing his Army greens, lost his life almost as soon as he set foot over there and another acquaintance of mine, a fellow lieutenant in a noncombat specialty, also “made the ultimate sacrifice,” as it’s euphemistically put, in that distant place, and, literally on my doorstep, a high-strung college roommate of mine, perhaps the unlikeliest candidate ever for donning uniform, had to get up in the middle of the night to catch a train to Chicago for a draft physical, which fortunately and only rightly disqualified him for service for I forget exactly what medical reason.
Such was the tumultuous world into which Lee Clarke, the hapless protagonist of Patrick DeWitt’s unsettling but not humorless new novel, awakens on the day when he finds awaiting him in his mailbox his draft notice, which, he mentally remarks, with its “greeting” salutation lacking even a more welcoming “s” at the end of the word, was “intended to resound in the mind’s ear as the voice of a truth one could not ever get away from: artless, spare, with no trace of comradeship.”
This despite his having been given to think by his draft officer that even though he has lost his deferment after being expelled from school for fighting, some accommodation might be made were he to re-enroll at another school within a prescribed time.
A situation Lee looks to immediately set to rights, enrolling at another institution almost as soon as the communication arrives, but, alas, even with proof of school registration squarely in hand, he’s told by his draft officer, a Mr. Dewey, that while, yes, it’s “strange” that the Selective Service had come calling as soon as it did (though he won’t go so far as to acknowledge a mistake had been made), there’s nothing to be done about it, the “machinery” is far enough along that he’ll almost certainly have to suit up and, yes, no doubt end up in Vietnam.
Indeed, the whole ambience of Dewey’s office, with its “lone aesthetic gesture” being an image on the wall of a “heroic eagle, descending from above in what looked to be a rage of activated patriotism (with) talons … blood-dipped, a fresh kill in (its) immediate past,” is uninviting of any sentiment disinclined toward “patriotic gore,” to use a phrase.
No quarter, at any rate, to be found there, where a banner unfurled about the eagle’s lower body reading “to a man, free” would seem to leave as the only logical choice for Lee to head for Canada, an option greeted with varying reactions by his family members as he sets out on a final odyssey before doing whatever he will end up doing, the first stop being his divorced father, whom Lee had never admired but always liked and who has fallen on hard times, having been reduced to dog-catching.
And while he is not overtly hostile to Lee’s intention, he cannot in good faith embrace it, having, as he puts it, with his own military service in World War II, “paid his way” to “hold my head up in the “United States of America,” his service having come at a time when, as he puts it, conscientious objectors were viewed in the same category as child molesters and religious freaks.
No cutting and running then, he declares, casting such behavior – getting out of Dodge, as it were – as “your generation’s contribution to the culture.”
Less resistant to Lee’s stated intention is his sister, who is having issues of her own with an affair with a married doctor, and his mother, whose abandonment of her marriage was what set his father on his downward course – “the cord connecting him to his duties was severed,” notes Lee in Robert Stone-like prose, and “his devolution commenced” – and in particular her brother, with whom she has been staying, and who among the family is most approving of Lee’s look northward for sanctuary, his greeting to Lee being to ask if he is “feeling waves of great bitterness at the lunatic machinery of mankind pulling you into its grim mechanisms in opposition to your wishes and against the common-sense morals of mother nature.”
Indeed, he finds Lee’s likely course of action a “romantic crime” -- “freedom at all costs and hang the consequences!”
A disquisition of sorts on war and patriotism, then, DeWitt’s novel, and delivered, as I say, in Robert Stone-like prose, making for a particularly absorbing read for me, with my own background, and coming at a time when, speaking of lunacy, the current holder of the nation’s highest office, without ever having served a day himself in uniform, indeed having used the available medical stratagems of the day to avoid it, has been banging the drums of war while professing no understanding of why service members would give their lives for something greater than themselves and even moved to prosecute veterans solely for advocating that soldiers not follow the sort of illegal orders that, to cite an especially egregious and relevant instance, made for the massacre at My Lai, which author William Styron cited as a symbol of the “moral degeneracy and criminal nature” of the Vietnam war.
Quite the thing to come to age on, at any rate, that fractured time, for me as well as Lee, and ably reconstructed in DeWitt’s fine novel, with its only possible fault for me being its conclusion, even if right offhand I can’t think what would have made for a more satisfying ending for me.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Dodge City, the latest novel from Patrick deWitt - perhaps best known for The Sisters Brothers - has written a story set in 1967, when Lee Clarke begins a road trip across America as is draft notice is served. The picaresque novel details Clarke's adventures as he calls on family members, and calling Cal, the woman he's almost been living with. deWitt has written a very entertaining, light-hearted novel that has a few darker undercurrents and has much to say about the America of the 1960s which could equally be relevant today. He writes with wit and style - if you've read his other work you know what to expect - and I breezed through this in one sitting, highly entertained.
Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.
Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Thanks to Netgalley and Ecco for the ebook. In 1967, at UCLA, Lee Clarke gets into a fight with a rich kid who gets him expelled, which leads to getting his draft notice. Lee signs up to drive a Porsche from LA to New Jersey. He’s leaving behind the beautiful, but elusive, Cal to visit his four living family members: Father, falling apart, Mother, surprisingly happy, brother, on the verge of collapse, twin sister, the person who knows Lee the most and creating drama for herself. Lee is planning to skip the draft and move to Canada and everyone he meets has a strong opinion about this. A great character road-trip.
May 19, 2026
Dodge City, a book about a young man’s encounters with friends, love, and family following his decision to dodge the Vietnam draft, put me in mind of complicated ‘70s movies; it’s Five Easy Pieces meets the Last Detail. It’s a novel featuring the sex, drugs and rock’n’roll of the ‘60s, but sad versions of each. It’s a book about decisions and consequences, destiny and control. A white pill hangover following a crashed party. A single bowling pin waiting to be toppled. I loved it, it’s a beautiful story.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews