The Sisters Brothers- Patrick deWitt

The Sisters Brothers, Patrick deWitt, Ecco Books, 2011

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? ... Shame, I thought. Shame and blood and degradation.

Gold rush fever is sweeping the country, and brothers and hired killers Eli and Charlie Sisters have been dispatched to California, sent to kill one Hermann Kermit Warm for offenses unknown. The Sisters Brothers, shortlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, tells the story of their journey from Oregon to California and back, as well as the story of Eli Sisters’ personal journey to find and become the man he wants to be.

While Charlie is nearly all sociopath, Eli is a killer with a (selective, anyway) conscience, and it is from his point of view we experience this adventure. Told in a style that calls to mind a carefully told Western (I’m reminded of the movies Unforgiven perhaps, or True Grit), the pacing of the story, along with the era-evoking formality of the dialogue and vocabulary made this book read like a film I could see and hear playing in my mind. Eli all at once funny, thoughtful, sensitive, violent, and dark. One moment I was amused by his quirks, charmed by his love for a woman, or moved by his profound compassion for his horse; the next I was startled by and cringing at his sudden, instinctive, and offhandedly brutal violence.

Eli and Charlie meet a host of colorful characters along the way and eventually forge an unlikely alliance with the man they’ve been sent to eliminate. They consider a new way of life, and Eli commits to becoming a different kind of person.  The question, of course, becomes will they? and can he?

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel – I was struck by the beautifully crafted sentences, the way the writing conveyed Eli’s distinctive personality as well as the time in which the story took place, the humor, and all the details of a rougher, earlier way of life. The storyline itself was intriguing – wild and adventurous, though not especially fast-paced. If I had any quibble at all, it was a very small one: late in the novel, Eli and Hermann Warm have a heart to heart conversation, and in one stretch, Warm tells his entire back-story. I wondered if there might not have been another way to relay all that information, but it didn’t detract from the overall excellence of the book. The tale then takes a dramatic turn or two before drawing to a gentle close. I highly recommend this novel for literary fiction fans who like to savor a story’s prose and setting as much as its plot.

The Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2011 Shortlist

Also check out Beth Fish Reads' thoughts and wonderful roundup of reviews of The Sisters Brothers and featured imprint Ecco Books

Happy reading!


many thanks to HarperCollins and Ecco Books for a complimentary copy of The Sisters Brothers. All opinions expressed are my own.

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