From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Dewitt's bang-up second novel (after Ablutions) is a quirky and stylish revisionist western. When a frontier baron known as the Commodore orders Charlie and Eli Sisters, his hired gunslingers, to track down and kill a prospector named Herman Kermit Warm, the brothers journey from Oregon to San Francisco, and eventually to Warm's claim in the Sierra foothills, running into a witch, a bear, a dead Indian, a parlor of drunken floozies, and a gang of murderous fur trappers. Eli's deadpan narration is at times strangely funny (as when he discovers dental hygiene, thanks to a frontier dentist dispensing free samples of "tooth powder that produced a minty foam") but maintains the power to stir heartbreak, as with Eli's infatuation with a consumptive hotel bookkeeper. As more of the brothers' story is teased out, Charlie and Eli explore the human implications of many of the clichés of the old west and come off looking less and less like killers and more like traumatized young men. With nods to Charles Portis and Frank Norris, DeWitt has produced a genre-bending frontier saga that is exciting, funny, and, perhaps unexpectedly, moving. (May)
1 comment:
Our Book Club had a great discussion on this book last week. Most of us liked it - the more pragmatic among us "could not get it". We talked about Eli's toothbrush, the chemical in the water that showed up the gold, why they went home to mother at the end - compared it to the movie Cat Ballou, learned the termed "picaresque novel", in which a rough character who for all his faults - in this book it's being a hired assassin- is nonetheless likeable. I already knew about de Witt's first novel, entitled Ablutions, but I didn't know there was another one - not a novel - which he entitled "Help Yourself Help Yourself" Sounds great!!
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