The Sisters Brothers

BookPage

“[A] thrilling, smart and surprisingly touching read…visual and visceral…always compelling and surprising.”

Good Reads

“This book is flat-out good times. Sarcastic, drunk, murderous cowboys...sign me up! ....Do yourself a favor and just read it.”

Philadelphia City Paper

“Cinematic, wry and mannered…. Just as much as THE SISTERS BROTHERS is about a killing, it’s also about the difficulty of holding on to or setting aside all the things a killer has to convince himself of to make his life palatable.”

Portland Book Review

“Portland author Patrick DeWitt has hit on a sure-fire road to success.”

Anniston Star

“…quirky and ultimately touching…The Sisters Brothers will seem a cruel romp to some, but Patrick Dewitt has written more than that, leaving in our hands not just a warning about the American Dream but a primer on how to deal with its legacy.”

Monday Mag

“If you’re looking for an unforgettable western, grab this one.”

The Stranger

“Patrick deWitt’s latest novel, The Sisters Brothers [evokes]... a feeling you revel in the re-creation of even more than you would enjoy going back to the original experience at its source.”

Austin Chronicle

“A twisted delight…Familiar, yes, but never not fresh. Also: creepy and sometimes inscrutable, gory with multiple amputations, rollicking and wistful and roundly winning.”

The Faster Times

“A rollicking Western adventure…THE SISTERS BROTHERS…is a great success both in the “literary” sense of a beautiful written and emotionally compelling, and in the sense that it is a genuinely badass Western.”

Capital Times

“…a heck of a lot of fun to read and surprisingly compelling when it ends.”

Roanoke Times

“A wickedly funny and innovative novel.”

Critical Mob

“…a pitch-perfect page-turner…The Sisters Brothers… cleverly refreshes the classic western novel by injecting it with absurdity, offbeat humor, and elements of the picaresque…at once highly entertaining and strangely affecting.”

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Sharp and wondrous…[a] funny, oddly moving novel.”

Library Journal

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 McCarthy 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

Library Journal

Eli Sisters is feeling grumpy; brother Charlie has been declared lead man on their next assignment from the Commodore. But it's a job, so off they ride to Sacramento with the aim of killing a gold miner the Commodore wants out of the way. As they track their quarry, encountering an odd assortment of whores, drunks, and visionaries, Eli begins to have qualms about the bloody life he leads. Both homage to the classic Western and knife thrust to its dark underbelly, this novel has a quirky, deadpan exterior and a hard-beating heart. Rabid in-house enthusiasm and film interest; John C. Reilly is attached to produce and star as Eli.

Kirkus Reviews

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 gold—so 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.

Ron Charles

…[deWitt] rides parallel to the trails of Jack Shaefer, James Carlos Blake and Cormac McCarthy, but he frequently crosses into comic territory to produce a story that's weirdly funny, startlingly violent and steeped in sadness…As the novel runs along, deWitt shifts the story in unpredictable directions, slowing the pace for a surreal finale in the woods that's touched with alchemy.
—The Washington Post

Outside magazine

“Funny and strange [and] oddly warm…you’ll find yourself ashamedly pulling for the brothers Sisters like you did for Jules and Vinnie in Pulp Fiction.”

Boston Globe

"A feast of delights in short punchy chapters.... Deliciously original and rhapsodically funny, this is one novel that ropes you in on page one, and isn’t about to ride off into the sunset any time soon."

Esquire

"Thrilling…a lushly voiced picaresque story…so richly told, so detailed, that what emerges is a weird circus of existence, all steel shanks and ponies, gut shots and medication poured into the eyeholes of the dying. At some level, this too is a kind of revenge story, marvelously blurry."

Dallas Morning News

"[THE SISTERS BROTHERS] is full of surprises, among them…is the quirky beauty of the language Patrick deWitt has devised for his narrator.... THE SISTERS BROTHERS is deWitt’s second novel…and is an inventive and ingenious character study. It will make you impatient for the third."

Los Angeles Times

"If Cormac McCarthy had a sense of humor, he might have concocted a story like Patrick DeWitt’s bloody, darkly funny western THE SISTERS BROTHERS...[DeWitt has] a skillfully polished voice and a penchant for gleefully looking under bloody bandages."

Cleveland Plain Dealer

"Like Tarantino, deWitt knows that attitude makes blood funny; like Twain, he understands a reader’s willingness to forgive a good narrator’s personal flaws."

The Onion AV Club

"The brothers’ punchily poetic banter and the book’s bracing bursts of violence keep this campfire yarn pulled taut."

NPR.org

"By turns hilarious, graphic and meditative, The Sisters Brothers hooked me from page one all the way to 300 — and I could have stayed on for many more."

Washington Post

"Weirdly funny, startlingly violent and steeped in sadness… It’s all rendered irresistible by Eli Sisters, who narrates with a mixture of melancholy and thoughtfulness."

Denver Post

"Original, entrancing and entertaining."

Time Out New York

"Wandering his Western landscape with the cool confidence of a practiced pistoleer, deWitt’s steady hand belies a hair trigger, a poet’s heart and an acute sense of gallows humor…the reader is likely to reach the adventure’s end in the same shape as Eli: wounded but bettered by the ride."

New York Times Book Review

"…gritty, as well as deadpan and often very comic…DeWitt has chosen a narrative voice so sharp and distinctive…it’s very narrowing of possibilities opens new doors in the imagination."

Daily Beast

"DeWitt’s THE SISTERS BROTHERS is a glorious picaresque Western; everything about this book is stylish, from its conceit to its cover design making it a truly worthy inclusion on the shortlist."

The Millions

"DeWitt’s exploitations of the picaresque form are striking, and he has a wonderful way of exercising his comic gifts without ever compromising the novel’s gradual accumulation of darkness, disgust, and foreboding."

Wells Tower

"A masterful, hilarious picaresque that keeps company with the best of Charles Portis and Mark Twain, The Sisters Brothers is a relentlessly absorbing feat of novelistic art."

Tom Perrotta's Favorite Fiction of 2011 on Salon.com

“[A]n odd gem...that has one of most engaging and thoughtful narrators I’ve come across in a long time....The novel belongs to the great tradition of subversive westerns...but deWitt has a deadpan comic voice and a sneaky philosophical bent that’s all his own.”

Notable Fiction of 2011

“This bloody buddy tale of two hired guns during the Gold Rush is weirdly funny, startlingly violent and steeped in sadness — a reaffirmation of the endurance of the Western.”

David Wroblewski

"A gorgeous, wise, riveting work of, among other things, cowboy noir….Honestly, I can’t recall ever being this fond of a pair of psychopaths."

Gil Adamson

"A bright, brutal revision of the Western, The Sisters Brothers offers an unexpected meditation on life, and on the crucial difference between power and strength."

Charles Bock

"At once dark and touching, The Sisters Brothers has something on every page to make you laugh. Patrick deWitt has given us a gift, reimagining the old west in a thoroughly original manner. Readers are all the better for it."

Tom Perrotta's Favorite Fiction of 2011

"[A]n odd gem...that has one of most engaging and thoughtful narrators I’ve come across in a long time....The novel belongs to the great tradition of subversive westerns...but deWitt has a deadpan comic voice and a sneaky philosophical bent that’s all his own."

Outside Magazine

"Funny and strange [and] oddly warm…you’ll find yourself ashamedly pulling for the brothers Sisters like you did for Jules and Vinnie in Pulp Fiction."

Tom Perrotta

"Patrick deWitt’s narrator—a hired killer with a bad conscience and a melancholy disposition—is a brilliant and memorable creation."

Wall Street Journal

"[T]here’s something cinematic about Mr. deWitt’s unadorned prose style, which at first made this reader do a double-take—can this be serious?—only to continue flicking the pages with pleasure."

The Onion A.V. Club

“The brothers’ punchily poetic banter and the book’s bracing bursts of violence keep this campfire yarn pulled taut.”

The Barnes & Noble Review

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt is the best novel I have read in years. It is so perfectly in accord with my tastes and sensibilities that it immediately took a place on my list of favorite novels –– a set of twenty–five oddly assorted and constantly reshuffled works (among them novels by E. F. Benson, Sigrid Undset, Charles Portis, Dawn Powell, Flann O'Brien, and Evelyn Waugh). But I'm hardly alone ? the novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in Britain and won Canada's Governor General's Award, higher than which no book can climb in those northern parts.

The Sisters Brothers wears the booze–and–blood–soaked mask of a western and is set during the California Gold Rush. It stars two hired killers –– the brothers Charlie and Eli Sisters –– and is punctuated by sixteen men shot dead, two poisoned, one drowned, and the report of another axed to death by his own hand. The death count further includes two bears, two horses, one dog, and nine beavers. Despite this carnage, the novel possesses the unlikely virtues of kindliness and understated humor, qualities that arise out of the sedate, ingenuous delivery of the story's narrator, Eli. He is the younger though beefier brother, a gentle, homespun philosopher (and killer) whom Charlie, a domineering, conscience–free brandy bibber, treats as his stooge.

When we meet the two, they are in the employ of a man called the Commodore and are setting out from Oregon City on a mission to California to murder a prospector, Herman Kermit Warm, who has got on the wrong side of their boss. Terrible details of their last venture soon emerge, not the least of them being that their horses were burned to death. Eli has now been consigned to Tub, a "portly and low–backed" horse whom he has to beat to keep moving. ("Tub believed me cruel and thought to himself, Sad life, sad life.")

Eli, too, is sad and profoundly lonely; his only intimate, aside from Tub –– for which unhappy creature he develops a melancholy loyalty –– is his brother. That relationship, despite occasional rays of amity, is not much comfort given the man's know–it–all bossiness and predilection for drink. In a typical scene we find Charlie heading into a saloon: "He invited me along," Eli tells us, "and though I did not much want to watch him grow hoggish with brandy I likewise did not wish to spend my time in the hotel room by myself, with its warped wallpaper, its drafts and dust and scent of previous boarders. The creak of bed springs suffering under the weight of a restless man is as lonely a sound as I know."

Bickering incessantly, the brothers encounter a number of obstacles to their progress, including Charlie's serial hangovers, a spider bite and tooth abscess that almost kill Eli, and problems with Tub. Early on, the poor horse is attacked by a grizzly who savages his eye; but he has a doughty heart. "Despite Tub's eye wound he never so much as stumbled," Eli tells us, "and I felt for the first time that we knew and understood each other; I sensed in him a desire to improve himself, which perhaps was whimsy or wishful thinking on my part, but such are the musings of the travelling man."

The brothers ride across territory marked with occasional signs of those who have traveled before them on their own roads to ruin. A sense of desolation and abandonment pervades the land; even in the towns, disillusion and hectic desperation prevail. The Old West of The Sisters Brothers is a phantasmagorical netherworld populated by the lost and the damned: a weeping man, an abandoned boy, a witch, a terrible little girl, degraded women, mad prospectors, and bands of killers. There would seem to be something of the allegory about all this, especially as the lust for gold is the force that has given the landscape its dark glare. But the novel's fine literary qualities operate against allegory's oppressive portentousness and self regard: deWitt's prose combines decorum with limberness; details of material life are vivid and concrete; and the brothers' actual predicament, characters, and relationship with each other are central to the story and humanely developed.

Above all, the novel is very funny. Its humor is deadpan and almost ineffable at times in its adroit mismatching of elements, of good heart and dreadful deed; even its title evokes this peculiar strain of incongruity. The Sisters Brothers is a great and wonderful novel by a man still in his thirties, a writer from whom I hope we will see much more.

Katherine A. Powers reviews books widely and has been a finalist for the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle.