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The Sisters Brothers
Patrick deWitt's The Sisters Brothers is a darkly funny anti-western narrated by a hired killer with a tender heart and a bad conscience: a Gold Rush odyssey that's part picaresque comedy, part melancholy meditation on the work of violence.
The Review
Our take
Two brothers, Eli and Charlie Sisters, ride south from Oregon City to San Francisco in 1851 to murder a man named Hermann Kermit Warm. That's the job. What deWitt does with it is the surprise. The novel is narrated by Eli, the softer brother, a big sad man who would rather be running a trading post than killing strangers, and his voice, polite, literal, prone to worry, is the engine of the whole book. He frets about his weight, dotes on his ailing horse, falls a little in love with every kind woman he meets, and then does terrible things because his brother tells him to. The gap between that gentle voice and the brutal trade is where all the comedy and most of the ache live.
Structurally it's an episodic road story, a string of strange encounters strung along the trail to California: a weeping man, a witchy hotel keeper, a dentist who introduces Eli to the miracle of the toothbrush, prospectors gone mad with gold fever. Each set piece is its own little tale, deadpan and slightly off-kilter, and deWitt has a gift for the comic detail that suddenly turns sad. The prose is clipped and formal, almost fable-like, which keeps the violence from ever feeling like a thrill. You laugh, and then a page later you feel a bit ashamed of having laughed.
The relationship between the brothers is the real spine. Charlie is the dangerous one, quick and cruel and usually drunk; Eli keeps trying to imagine a different life and keeps getting pulled back. Watching Eli slowly question the only work he knows gives the book a genuine moral weight under all the absurdity. By the time their fortunes turn in the California gold fields, the story has quietly become about loyalty, exhaustion, and what you owe the brother who has dragged you into hell.
The honest caveat: this is a western for people who like their westerns sideways. If you want straight gunslinging adventure, the slow, talky, melancholy pace and the abrupt tonal shifts may frustrate you, and the violence, when it comes, is matter-of-fact rather than rousing. The reward is a book that's genuinely original, funny and sorrowful in the same breath, with an ending that lands softer and truer than you expect.
Why you should read
- Great if you like westerns with a comic, literary slant
- Great if you love a distinctive, deadpan narrator
- Great if you enjoy episodic, picaresque road stories
- Great if you want comedy and melancholy in the same book
What to expect
- A gentle, anxious killer narrating his own bad deeds
- Episodic encounters that turn comic then sad
- Clipped, fable-like prose and offbeat tone
- Matter-of-fact violence rather than rousing action
It's a short, strange, deeply humane novel that uses the trappings of the frontier to ask what a decent man does when decency isn't on offer. deWitt won a shelf of awards for it, and you can feel why: the control of tone is remarkable, holding slapstick and grief in the same hand without ever spilling either. It reads quickly but lingers a long time, the kind of book whose final image keeps surfacing days after you close it. Come for the dark comedy; stay for Eli Sisters, who may be the most lovable killer in recent fiction.
Reviewed by Rowan
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.