Patrick DeWitt’s
The Sisters Brothers is a perfect Western, which is why it’s so startling that it’s a comedy about a protracted existentialist crisis. The Gold Rush-era story of two bounty-hunters, the philosophical Eli and his rowdier, more impulsive brother Charlie, it unfolds slowly as they head from Oregon to California to kill a prospector-alchemist named Hermann Kermit Warm at the behest of a shady figure known as the Commodore. Eli doesn’t exactly love what they do for a living (he’d rather work in a shop, he thinks), while Charlie doesn’t question it. As they make their way south, in a picaresque-fashion they stumble from one (often gritty) misadventure to the next, and eventually wind up teaming up with Warm when they finally find him. The best part of the novel is the narration—Eli is the ambivalent moral compass normally absent from Westerns, a kind of extreme normalcy and humanity amidst a desolate and unforgiving landscape and livelihood. He is ever-loving towards his cruel and reckless brother, a little anxious about his weight, and gets extremely excited when he purchases a toothbrush for the first time. Charlie, on the other hand, is scary—and you’ll spend pages worrying that the complicated, loving bond between them will be Charlie’s to selfishly, stupidly break. Eli’s sincerity is what keeps everything afloat, as well as makes it all feel so precarious.
His considerate, soft-spoken-ness is jarringly interrupted by unsettling (usually gruesome, sometimes disgusting) moments of gore—sometimes violence, sometimes other nauseating things. The imagery is stunning—there are passages here and there, both horrifying and not, that have stuck with me since I read it. There is, I should warn you, some extremely tough, hard-to-read violence against horses (usually something that will compel me to burst into tears and stop reading/watching the thing at hand, but I was so interested in the story that still cried but plugged on). It’s elements like this that recall how, for all its creativity and charm,
The Sisters Brothers is actually extremely sad: a wrenching evocation of a bitter moment in the history of mankind, as it tries and fails to make progress. On a different note, it also has the single best title of a fictional work, possibly ever. In my opinion.
–Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow