Those who read last year's Man Booker shortlist tended to agree that the poor judges, much mocked, actually did well to highlight Patrick deWitt's previously untipped novel The Sisters Brothers, a violent, strange, melancholy western in blue-ribbon prose.
Ablutions, deWitt's Hollywood-set debut from 2009, tells the story of a young barman's drift into drink and divorce. Sketch-based, it evokes with good humour the lives of his crazed colleagues and clientele, whose nightly revels terminate in violence and vice – never more so than when Merlin (a 70-year-old, bearded psychic) warns that in "four months and seventeen days" the manager, a coke-addled ex-model from Johannesburg, will die of gunshot wounds. A garrison of staff and regulars tools up on the appointed date, only for their vigil to give way to an orgy once a former child star decides to raise hell with a couple of call girls. However, with a larcenous cut-and-run ploy up his scotch-soaked sleeve, our barman isn't quite the hopeless case he might seem.
DeWitt traces such screwball extravaganzas without lapsing into I'm-mad-me zaniness. He also has an ear for cadence and an eye for detail: a wino decorates napkins with the aid of a "jellyfish-coloured" plastic ruler, while "apricot-coloured bile" heralds yet another morning after the night before. The feedback loops of addiction are caught in taut, paratactic sentences, adverb- and comma-light: "Whiskey or no whiskey you are drunk and angry at yourself and you wonder why you are unable to help yourself and your mood is desperate and no pills will change this and so you take no more and you do not stop for single cans of Budweiser and by the time you pull over to sleep you are sick and in pain."
Ablutions doesn't glorify alcoholism, but nor does it present a moral, skilfully dodging the traps it sets itself. That second-person narration, for instance, risks looking like a gimmick but you grow to view it as a symptom of the protagonist's self-obliteration. And where a more conventional novel might have added a dollop of backstory as a key to his pain, here there's nothing but a void.
