Incite

Some time in the early fall last year, the Globe & Mail published an article that decried the impending season of literary readings. Who can endure another mind-numbing, death by droning performance, by a writer who should never be allowed near a microphone, the article’s author asked? You’d be right if you assumed that my initial reaction was defensive, not surprising given that my job is to program readings and convince audiences that attending them is worth their time and money. On the other hand, I have sat through literally thousands of readings and I know they can also be moving, provocative, hilarious and not to be too grandiose about it, soul-enriching.

A week ago the VIWF hosted an Incite event with the Canadian writer Merilyn Simonds and the American poet Tess Gallagher. Merilyn’s new book, A New Leaf, is a gentle evocation of her relationship with her garden. Tess asked me the night before the event if I could bring her a copy of Merilyn’s book. She took it back to the hotel with her and started reading right away. The next morning she selected some of her poems with Merilyn’s tone and sensibility in mind. At the event Merilyn was up first and read a section about pruning an apple orchard that had been neglected by the previous owners of her centuries-old house. When Tess took the stage she read a poem about going into her garden to prune a tree to improve her view of the mountains. Upon discovering a bird’s nest on one of the limbs, she decided to leave it. Then she imagined all the unseen nests that might populate the tree and decided that leaving a home for the birds was more important than her view.

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Patrick deWitt is the author of two novels, Ablutions: Notes for a Novel (2009), and The Sisters Brothers (2011), and Help Yourself Help Yourself (2007), which deWitt’s web site describes as “a short book of random writings and bad advice.” His imaginative, unflinching writing has quickly gained a wide and enthusiastic following. Film rights for The Sisters Brothers have already been sold.

Ablutions drags the depths of a naugahyde-seedy Hollywood bar, the kind of place hidden away from daylight that America does best. The narrator works in the bar, and presents “the regulars” with a combination of excoriating acuity and black humour, constructing a murky aquarium of exotic types, with the most exotic being the Lowryesque narrator himself.

Wrapped in the trappings of a western, The Sisters Brothers follows Eli and Charlie Sisters, two nineteenth-century hit men on a job, as they travel on horseback from Oregon City toward their target in gold-rush-era San Francisco. On one level a violent and fast-paced picaresque narrative, the novel is also a meditation on loneliness, alienation, power, greed, and the countervailing forces of human connectedness and fellow feeling — aspects of society and the human psyche brought into sharp relief by the historical setting, while also transcending it.

DeWitt’s writing is visceral, dark, and yet not gratuitously unkind or devoid of a moral center.

DeWitt was born on Vancouver Island, has lived in California and Washington, and currently lives in Portland, Oregon. He will be appearing at Incite with Madeleine Thien and Jen Sookfong Lee at Vancouver Public Library on May 25^th.

Festival blogger Lachlan Murray asked Patrick deWitt several questions about his work.

Tell us about your book, The Sisters Brothers.

It’s Hoss and Little Joe from Bonanza in couples therapy.

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