Picaresque siblings
By John Vernon |
July 31, 2011, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
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. éTub! Assist me in my time of need!"
This is dime-novel speech and 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.
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. "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.
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. éTub! Assist me in my time of need!"
This is dime-novel speech and 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.
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. "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.
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