Review by New York Times Review
IT is 1851 in the Oregon Territory, and Charlie and Eli Sisters have been ordered by the Commodore to go to California and kill a man called Hermann Kermit Warm. They ride their horses, Nimble and Tub, and along the way meet "the weeping man" and a dentist, Reginald Watts. These characters and their names, not completely Dickensian, or even Pynchonian, but not exactly commonplace either, are emblematic of Patrick DeWitt's novel "The Sisters Brothers" - not always serious, not always funny, sometimes derivative of old westerns, sometimes a parody of them. The brothers are told that when they kill Mr. Warm they must steal his "formula," which turns out to be a chemical solution that enables gold seekers to find what they're looking for without all that digging and sifting. Its effect on those who employ it - the price it exacts upon greed - is the comeuppance dealt out in this picaresque novel. The ancestor of all road movies and novels, the picaresque in its classic form is narrated by a rogue from the lower stations who, on his journey, rises through the classes as he encounters various typecast characters - blind beggars, impoverished noblemen, lusty women. It's a satirical genre that sends up not only such social types but the narrator himself, whose education consists of learning to adopt bourgeois hypocrisies. It's also usually narrated in a gritty vernacular, and the version of 19th-century Western speech in "The Sisters Brothers" is surely gritty, as well as deadpan and often very comic. Eli Sisters tells the story in a loftily formal fashion, doggedly literal, vulgar and polite at turns, squeezing humor out of stating the obvious with flowery melodrama. "Tub!" Eli cries at one point, "I am stuck inside the cabin of the vile gypsy-witch. . . . Tub! Assist me in my time of need!" This is dime-novel speech, and DeWitt's version of it raises interesting questions. Did real-life Western vernacular sound like this snippet from George Ruxton's 1849 travel narrative, "Life in the Far West" : "Do 'ee hyar now, you darned crittur?" Or did it sound like this, from "The Sisters Brothers": "'Your hat is tattered, also.' 'I like my hat.' 'You seem to have known each other a long while, judging by the sweat rings.' My face darkened and I said, 'It is impolite to speak of other people's clothing like that.'" The answer is neither. When eye dialect is, thankfully, no longer the fashion, reported speech like that in Ruxton seems magically to vanish from the historical record. And when formal politeness is in fashion (thanks to Charles Portis's "True Grit"), sometimes, to be sure, combined with numbing expletives (thanks to the HBO series "Deadwood"), its ultimate source is novels written by Eastern authors who were taught in school that good writing displays a horror of contractions. DeWitt's version of this vernacular is a stylized abstraction of Western speech after it originated in the South, found a niche in the Civil War and crossed the Mississippi, where it passed through any number of filters: political orations, florid journalism and mouths too full of chaw to say much, to name just a few. DeWitt has chosen a narrative voice so sharp and distinctive, even if limited in its range, that its very narrowing of possibilities opens new doors in the imagination. Here is Eli, about to shoot a man: "My very center was beginning to expand, as it always did before violence, a toppled pot of black ink covering the frame of my mind, its contents ceaseless, unaccountably limitless. My flesh and scalp started to ring and tingle and I became someone other than myself, or I became my second self, and this person was highly pleased to be stepping from the murk and into the living world where he might do just as he wished. I felt at once both lust and disgrace and wondered, Why do I relish this reversal to animal?" This, like the novel's climax, is both striking and strange. It describes a kind of truth that DeWitt is clearly more than capable of investigating. Other passages do likewise - his portrait of San Francisco's "madness of possibilities" during the gold rush, for example. With its $100 prostitutes, its $30 meals of meat, spuds and ice cream, and its harbor choked with ships whose cargos were never unloaded because the crews ran off to the gold fields, San Francisco is the perfectly surreal centerpiece of "The Sisters Brothers." Yet such scenes are too infrequent, especially in the novel's desultory first half. Picaresques are by nature episodic, but this doesn't justify a plot with so many anticlimaxes and dead ends. DeWitt seems to be fond of rescuing his characters from dire predicaments by means of convenient expedients, like gunmen falling out of trees, but is this parody or laziness? In addition, the novel's deadpan dialogue occasionally suffers from slippage, and its portentous declarations can sound, well, portentous. ("Death stalks all of us upon this earth!" Eli shouts when he learns some trappers plan to kill him.) "The Sisters Brothers" could have been an unnerving black comedy, but its sketchiness and the inherent silliness of its McGuffin, the "formula," finally sap its ability to unsettle us. It is 1851 in the Oregon Territory, and Charlie and Eli Sisters have been ordered to kill a man in California. John Vernon's most recent novel is "Lucky Billy." He teaches in the creative writing program at Binghamton University.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 24, 2011]
Review by Booklist Review
Eli and Charlie Sister's latest mission is to ride down to California to take out prospector Hermann Kermit Warm. It's unclear why the brothers' boss, the Commodore, wants Warm dead, but it is clear that the mission is likely to be difficult. The Commodore has appointed Charlie, a whiskey-loving brute who doesn't mind killing, to be lead man on this operation. As it's the first time a lead man has been appointed for one of the Sisters' assignments, this rubs Eli the wrong way, and he doesn't let Charlie forget it. The brutality of their work begins to wear on Eli's gentle and retiring nature, and while Charlie kills, fights, and bullies, Eli begins to question what he does and whom he does it for. DeWitt assembles a host of motley characters for this romping adventure while presenting a good character study in Eli, a narrator who's as likely to pontificate on the trouble with horses as to describe a gunfight.--Hunt, Julie Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly 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 cliches 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) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This engrossing novel, set during the gold rush years of the 1850s, begins as a gritty, unapologetic homage to pulp Westerns (with perhaps a nod to Cormac Mc-Carthy as well). In the final pages, however, as the hired guns at the center of the story are forced by circumstances to rethink their lives, the novel turns into something much more philosophical, existential, and extraordinary. The protagonists are two brothers, Eli and Charlie Sisters, widely known for their brutality. They are sent from Oregon City to California to kill an enemy of their boss, the mysterious Commodore. DeWitt (Ablutions) brings the saloons, the ratty frontier towns, and the West itself vividly to life here, and the large cast of colorful characters are skillfully drawn. It's the concluding pages, however, that give the novel its surprising integrity and power. It becomes, in effect, a different kind of novel, profoundly literary, and devoted to serious philosophical meditation. VERDICT Recommended for fans of Westerns and literary fiction.-Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A calmly vicious journey into avarice and revenge.The unusual title refers to Charlie and Eli Sisters, the latter of whom narrates the novel. The narrative style is flat, almost unfeeling, though the action turns toward the cold-blooded. It's 1851, and the mysterious Commodore has hired the Sisters brothers to execute a man who's turned against him. The brothers start out from their home in Oregon City in search of the equally improbably named Hermann Kermit Warm. The hit has been set up by Henry Morris, one of the Commodore's minions, so the brothers set off for San Francisco, the last-known home of Warm. Along the way they have several adventures, including one involving a bear with an apple-red pelt. A man named Mayfield is supposed to pay them for this rare commodity but instead tries to cheat them, and the brothers calmly shoot four trappers who work for him. Charlie is the more sociopathic of the two, more addicted to women and brandy, while Eli, in contrast, is calmer, more rational, and even shows signs of wanting to give up the murder-for-hire business and settle down. But first, of course, they need to locate Warm. It turns out Morris has thrown in his lot with Warm, a crazed genius who has seemingly discovered a formula that helps locate goldso much so that he can get in a day what it takes panners a month to glean. When they finally get to the gold-panners, the brothers wind up joining them, removing literally a bucket of gold from the stream. The caustic quality of Warm's formula leads to disaster, however, and Indians show up at an opportune moment to steal the gold.DeWitt creates a homage to life in the Wild West but at the same time reveals its brutality.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
