The Sisters Brothers

I do not read many westerns, which might be why The Sisters Brothers surprised me. I expected gunfights and sunsets and a hero with a code. What I got was a narrator with a toothache, a horse with one eye, and a running argument about whether it is worth riding all the way to California to kill a man you have never met. Patrick deWitt published the novel in 2011, and it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, which tells you something about how far it travels beyond its genre. It is a western in setting and a comedy of manners in tone. It is also, quietly, a book about two brothers who love each other in the only way they know how.

Eli Sisters narrates. He is the younger brother, the more thoughtful one, the one who notices the food, the horses, the clothes, and the way people look at him. Charlie is the older brother, the lead man on the job, a drinker and a killer who treats violence as ordinary work. They are hired by a wealthy businessman known only as the Commodore to travel from Oregon City to California and murder a prospector named Hermann Kermit Warm. The Commodore says Warm is a thief. The brothers do not ask many questions. They have been doing this for years, and the pay is good.

The relationship between Eli and Charlie is the engine of the book. Eli admires Charlie. He also fears him. Charlie can be charming when he wants something and cruel when he does not. He makes Eli feel like a junior partner in a business that Eli is not sure he wants to be in. Eli wants to leave the life. He wants to buy a store, or a farm, or a house with a woman who loves him. He wants to stop killing people. Charlie wants to keep going, partly because he is good at it and partly because he does not know who he would be without it.

The novel is also a study of how violence becomes ordinary. The brothers do not agonize over every killing. They make jokes, eat breakfast, and argue about horses. The banality is the point. DeWitt shows how a person can become accustomed to terrible things and still notice a toothache or a beautiful sunset. Eli's sensitivity does not make him innocent. It makes him complicit and aware of his complicity, which is a different kind of pain.

The road south

The plot is episodic, and that is deliberate. The brothers ride south and meet a series of strange people. Eli is bitten by a spider and develops a fever. He visits a dentist and has a tooth removed with the help of morphine. His horse is attacked by a grizzly bear and survives with a serious eye injury. Charlie gets drunk and is too sick to ride the next morning. They argue about money, horses, and each other. The arguments are funny, but they are also revealing. Eli is constantly trying to manage Charlie's moods, and Charlie is constantly testing Eli's loyalty.

The most memorable early episode is the weeping man. They meet a man on the road who is crying, and Charlie treats him with contempt. Eli is disturbed. The scene does not have a big payoff. It just sits there, a reminder that the brothers are moving through a world full of people whose suffering they are trained to ignore. That is one of deWitt's strategies. He gives you a grotesque or a joke, then lets it turn into something sad.

Mayfield and the red bear

In California, the brothers hear about a female bear with a rare red pelt. A man named Mayfield has offered a reward for it. They spot the bear, and Charlie kills it. They bring the pelt to Mayfield, who runs an inn in a town named after himself. Mayfield pays them, and Charlie insists they stay the night. Eli sleeps with the hotel's bookkeeper. In the morning, the pelt is missing. The brothers suspect Mayfield will accuse them of stealing it, so they try to sneak out. A group of fur trappers who work for Mayfield stops them and demands the money back. Charlie and Eli shoot the trappers. Then Charlie kills an innocent stable boy to eliminate witnesses. The killing is casual, almost administrative. Eli does not stop him. That is the moment where the novel's comedy curdles.

They return to the hotel and make a deal with Mayfield. He has a cache of gold and wants to leave town to hunt an old enemy. The brothers let him go, take most of the gold, and hide a large amount behind the hotel's stove for safekeeping. It is a fortune, and it is the first time the book allows Eli to imagine a different life. The gold represents the possibility of walking away.

Morris's journal

In San Francisco, the brothers look for a man named Morris, who was supposed to keep track of Warm until they arrived. Morris has disappeared. The hotel proprietor gives them Morris's journal. The journal reveals that Warm approached Morris with a chemical formula that makes gold glow in riverbeds. Warm demonstrated the formula and offered Morris a partnership. They are now traveling to a place called the River of Light to test it on a large scale. The journal also reveals that Warm is not a thief. He refused to share the formula with the Commodore, and the Commodore sent the brothers to kill him.

Eli hesitates. He does not want to murder an innocent man. Charlie wants to finish the job. They argue, and Eli says this will be his last job for the Commodore. The decision to continue is not a moral choice. It is a habit, and a loyalty to Charlie that Eli cannot quite name.

The river of light

They find Warm and Morris at a camp along a remote river. Warm knows they were sent to kill him, but he does not retaliate. The brothers defend the camp from a gang of bandits, and the four men decide to join forces. It is an uneasy alliance, but it works. Warm is smart, funny, and generous. Morris is quieter, but he clearly loves Warm. The novel does not make a spectacle of their relationship. It presents it as a fact, which is more moving than a speech would be.

They wait for nightfall to pour the formula into the river. The chemical is caustic. Warm and Morris have already burned their legs wading in contaminated water. Charlie spills some on his shooting hand. The men collect a fortune in gold as the river glows. Then Morris falls into the water, and Warm dives in to save him. Both men are severely burned. They die the following day. The gold is stolen by a party of Native warriors who stumble onto the camp. Eli realizes that no one but Warm knew how to make the formula. The fortune is gone, and so is the man who made it.

The scene is the heart of the book. It is absurd and tragic at the same time. The gold glows, the men burn, and the river keeps running. deWitt does not underline the symbolism. He lets it sit. The dream of wealth turns out to be a chemical that destroys the people who touch it.

The return

The brothers make their way back to Oregon City. They stop at Mayfield and discover that the town has burned down and the gold they hid behind the stove is gone. Mayfield's prostitutes rob them of their remaining money and their pistols. Charlie's burned hand becomes infected and is amputated in Jacksonville. The operation saves his life, but it takes away the thing that made him formidable. After the amputation, Charlie's confidence disappears. He is quiet, dependent, and a little frightened. Eli nurses him back to health.

The change in Charlie is the novel's most affecting turn. He was never a good man, but he was a strong one. Now he is neither. Eli does not gloat. He does not say I told you so. He takes care of his brother because that is what he does. The relationship that seemed so unequal at the start becomes a partnership of a different kind. Eli is the one who is strong now, and he is not sure he wants the job.

The Commodore in the bath

Before they go home, Eli visits the Commodore. He finds him drunk in a bathtub, talking to himself. Eli drowns him. It is not a heroic killing. It is a tired man ending a relationship that has used him for years. The Commodore is not a grand villain. He is a rich man who treats people as tools. Eli kills him because he wants to be free, and because he has learned that the only way to leave the life is to cut the head off the thing that keeps hiring him.

The brothers return to their mother's house. She welcomes them. Charlie asks for a bath. Eli sits in his childhood bedroom and feels something he has not felt in a long time: peace. The ending is not a triumph. The gold is gone, the brother is maimed, and the future is uncertain. But they are alive, and they are home. For Eli, that is enough.

What the novel is doing

The Sisters Brothers is often called a revisionist western, and that is accurate. It takes the genre's myths, the lone gunman, the frontier fortune, the violent code, and shows the damage they do. The west of the novel is not a place of freedom. It is a place of extraction. Everyone is trying to take something from someone else: gold, land, dignity, a life. The brothers are part of that economy, and they are also its victims. Their childhood was violent, and they have reproduced it.

The prose is deadpan and precise. Eli notices the material world in a way that makes the book feel grounded: the taste of bad coffee, the weight of a pistol, the way a horse favors an injured eye. The humor comes from the gap between what Eli sees and what he is willing to admit. He is a killer who wants to be a shopkeeper. He is a sentimental man who works for a man who has no sentiment at all. That contradiction is the book's comic engine and its moral center.

The weaknesses are related to the strengths. The episodic structure can feel meandering. Some encounters exist mainly for atmosphere. The novel's treatment of Native people is thin, and the one scene where Native warriors steal the gold uses them as a plot device rather than as characters. The female characters are mostly seen through Eli's desire or Charlie's contempt. The book is aware of its own limitations, but awareness is not the same as correction.

I think the novel earns its reputation. It is funny, sad, and strange. It takes a familiar story and makes it feel new. It is also a fast read, which is not a small thing. I finished it in three days, and I kept thinking about the river, the glowing gold, and the two brothers riding home with less than they started with. That is the mark of a book that will stay with me.

Who should read it

This is for readers who like westerns but are tired of the usual heroes. It is for readers who like dark comedy and do not need to like the characters. It is for anyone who has a sibling they love and do not fully understand. It is not for readers who want a traditional adventure story or a clear moral. The book is ambiguous, and it is comfortable with that. It is also not for readers who are sensitive to violence against animals or casual murder. The violence is not graphic, but it is constant.

I picked it up because of the Booker nomination and the cover. I kept reading because of Eli's voice. He is not a good man, but he is a trying one, and that is more interesting. The Sisters Brothers is a western about the end of the west, and about two men who are trying to figure out what comes next. It does not give them an answer. It gives them a bath, a bedroom, and a mother who is glad to see them. Sometimes that is enough.