WINNING The Man Booker Prize is not that important. Far more crucial is that coveted place on the shortlist and there will always be people who will say that you should have won no matter what happens.
Canadian Patrick deWitt appears to have a Zen stillness about him, but then again, he may just be exhausted. He looks tired but he is also calm and very modest. He is genuinely surprised that so many readers are so positive about his wonderful Western, The Sisters Brothers, a singular tragic comedy that will become a cult regardless of how popular it may also be. "Particularly in Ireland," he says, admitting that he was expecting complaints about the treatment horses endure throughout the narrative.
“I thought the Irish may, might,” he pauses and looks down, before continuing, “object.” He peers intently, his long, pale face wearing its habitual expression of pained concern. Tub, the horse who carries Eli, the narrator, from Oregon City to California, suffers surreal cruelty but he is the novel’s hero and certainly encourages Eli to reform his ways.
DeWitt is gentle, soft spoken, very thin and looks as if he should be a computer nerd in a Thomas Pynchon novel. In fact, the longer one looks at him, the more Pynchon comes to mind. Does he like Pynchon? DeWitt looks slightly startled by such a random non sequitur but deals with it with what quickly becomes clear is his natural graciousness. “Oh yes, I like Pynchon, but I really like Jean Rhys.” Warming to the subject, he adds dreamily, “I think I fell in love with her . . .” his voice trails off and he smiles his slow, melancholic smile before mentioning that the great Dutch-born Austrian Thomas Bernhard is another favourite. “My reading is, um, varied.”
It does seem strange that a Canadian, born in Vancouver Island – “the name’s Norwegian, I should know why, but I don’t, my grandfather did a family tree but he died” – would have taken the Western genre and worked such freshness into a traditional genre.
Did he dream about being a cowboy? DeWitt now seems openly shocked. “No. Not at all. I was never interested in Westerns. I don’t even know anything about horses. But I did spend a lot of time in LA.” He agrees that although in California, Los Angeles is hardly the American West. He laughs out loud at this and then sighs. He often sighs. “It was Dad’s idea. For a while we travelled back and forth between LA and Canada. Dad had this thing about LA, he romanticised it and then he began to dislike it. I disliked it, LA, I mean.”
You have to like deWitt, he is used to conversation. "In my family, we talk." He thinks about what he says, and speaks with unusual candour. "I flunked out of high school, I just couldn't do it." He shudders at the memory and then returns to explaining how he wrote The Sisters Brothers. "I have two brothers, I'm the middle one. The title came to me."
The novel began when he had an idea about two unfriendly men, riding on horseback. “I could see the space, the vast empty frontier and I thought about things like loneliness and how much people must have needed friends, wanted friends. I mean you could be out there for days, in the desert. Weeks, with no one. No wonder cowboys got so close to their horses.”
He looks relieved on hearing my surprise that The Sisters Brothershas been compared with Cormac McCarthy whose work is so different from deWitt's. "I've never read him. The only Western writer I've read is . . ." and we both say "Charles Portis" simultaneously. But deWitt had read far more Portis than True Grit. "And you know, that's not the best one. Have you read Norwood? The Dog of the South? Gringos? I think Portis is a great writer, not really a writer of Westerns. But I should say that writing The Sister Brothersleft me with a real respect for the genre."
VIOLENCE IS ESSENTIAL to the plot. “There is no way around that. It was a hard time, people just had to kill. It was part of life. And my central characters are killers.” The dynamic between the two brothers is interesting; Charlie the elder is fixed on the job, his money, his beer.
“Charlie is completely selfish and has no interest in anyone, only himself. I’ve met people like that.” Eli, the narrator, who worships his brother and gets nothing in return, is beginning to think about what he does. “And that is largely through his horse, and I think he is also divided about what he does, kill and murder, the stuff he is paid to do, and what he begins to think about, the right of it, the morality.”
Tub, the horse described by Eli as “portly and low-backed”, is stoic. Soon after being given the horse as a replacement for his previous mount – who was burned to death – Eli is studying Tub as he waits for Charlie and knows that as he does whip the horse, looking for speeds it can’t possibly deliver, “Tub believed me cruel and thought to himself, ‘Sad life, sad life.’” DeWitt feels that empathy is the key to survival, and it is certainly a quality vital to the book.
"It is this empathy that causes Eli to think." Eli seems slightly off centre. It is as if he has seen too much. The same might be said of deWitt who is only 36 but has amassed some terrifying life experiences. "I drank too much, I took drugs, I made my wife feel that she could no longer love me, that was hard and that's what made me stop." When he said that he had expected Irish readers not to like The Sisters Brothers, he meant it. But as he says with as much emphasis as his soft-spoken manner will allow, "I did think that they would like my first book. In fact I thought that book would really be understood in Ireland."
Ablutionswas published in 2009 to a positive, if narrow, critical response. Anyone who read it was impressed but it remained low key. "It's about a guy working in a bar in LA. I worked in a bar. And I was drunk most of the time, just like the guy in the book." He says all of this without a trace of bravado. "Not only was I drunk at work, I was drunk when I drove home. And you know, I decided that my car had magic powers as I never had an accident, never even got stopped by the cops." As he describes the life he lived and the way it is replicated by the characters in Ablutions, I mutter "sounds like The Lost Weekend" to which deWitt replies, " More like The Long Weekend" and gives a short laugh before adding " I loved The Lost Weekend."
I promise to read that first novel before writing this piece and I did read it. Although it bears no resemblance to a revisionist Western set in the 1850s, the black, deadpan wit is already present. “My family is like that. We deal with life through humour. My dad used to drink a lot as well.”
He remains close to his parents. “They moved up to Portland [Oregan],” where deWitt lives with his wife, who is from northern California, and their son, “to be near us, so that’s good”.
He mentions Raymond Carver and how much that kind of hard life experience shapes some writers. "I lost everything and then, got it back. I had always wanted to write, since I was 15 and my father began giving me books to read, but I have read all kinds of things, while there's tons of stuff I could as easily have read but just haven't gotten around to it." He hasn't read any of the other five contenders which includes another Canadian second novel, Half Blood Bluesby poet Esi Edugyan.
"It's funny; The Sisters Brotherscame out in the States, Canada and Britain more or less at the same time. But when the news of the shortlist happened, I think they printed like another 35,000 copies. In Canada, the prize is taken very seriously." Margaret Atwood won in 2000 for The Blind Assassin, while Yann Martel took it two years later with Life of Pi.
Prizes don’t appear to mean all that much to deWitt, but writing does.
Ablutions, far more European than North American, is a terrifying account of addiction told with a lucidity that approaches madness: The narrator stands in the shower, a bottle of pills in his hand. "Time passes and the pills are taking hold like a glowing white planet coming into view; a reverse eclipse, and you watch with your eyes closed, your body propped in the corner of the stall like a mannequin. There is a knock on the bathroom door but you ignore it. The white planet is half exposed: it grips your heart in its light and seems to be pulling you forward, and now you know that you are falling. You are awake but dreaming."
Elsewhere, having driven home from work too drunk to stand, the barman takes his bike and cycles off through Santa Monica, cars swerving to avoid him, he skids and soars over the handle bars in free-fall. The same free-fall that deWitt was inhabiting at the time – until his wife walked away. “That made me think,” he says. “We’re okay now.”
On his writing he says, "voice is so important. I did the first book in the second person. And then with The Sisters Brothers, once I had Eli's voice, I had the story.
“I gave it to my brother to read and I remember him saying that it was good, the best thing I had done, but so sad. And I think that’s good to be – funny and sad. Now I’m already 100 pages into a new book, but I haven’t yet got the voice, I’m still waiting to hear it.”
The Sisters Brothersby Patrick deWitt is published by Granta
