Patrick deWitt
In conversation with David Berry
Monday, October 19 | 7 PM
Forsyth Hall, Downtown Library | $10
Dodge City:
Dodge City is a rollicking novel about a young man on an amphetamine-fueled cross-country road trip, fleeing the draft for the safe haven of Canada.
Dodge City is the upcoming sixth novel by award-winning, bestselling STARFest alumni Patrick deWitt, scheduled for publication on September 29, 2026. DeWitt last appeared at STARFest in 2018.
About Patrick deWitt
Patrick deWitt is the author of the novels The Librarianist (an instant #1 national bestseller and winner of the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour), French Exit (an international bestseller and a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize), The Sisters Brothers (winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Leacock Medal for Humour, and a finalist for the Booker Prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize), and the critically acclaimed Undermajordomo Minor and Ablutions. Born in British Columbia, he now resides in Portland, Oregon.
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 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 family: 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.
David Berry is a writer and editor who lives in Edmonton. He has worked as a critic, feature writer and essayist for the National Post, the Globe and Mail, the Walrus, CBC, Hazlitt and many others. He’s the author of two books of non-fiction: On Nostalgia (2020), and How Artists Make Money and How Money Makes Artists.
