Patrick deWitt's latest novel, The Sisters Brothers, is like your favorite meal: full of unique yet familiar flavors, easily digestible but still filling. It evokes a time and place in your memory without being exactly of that time and place—a feeling you revel in the re-creation of even more than you would enjoy going back to the original experience at its source.
It's no surprise, then, that more comparisons have been drawn between The Sisters Brothers and the recent Coen brothers film adaptation of the novel True Grit by Charles Portis than between deWitt and Portis himself. DeWitt's novel contains elements of the book—formal dialogue with contractions permitted only on the rarest occasions, an unlikely pairing of characters who take on a mission to kill—but it's the way these elements were filtered and repurposed by the Coen brothers that strikes a more resonant chord with deWitt's style and intention. He, like the Coens, is riffing, not re-creating, and the riff satisfies our longing for the original so well it almost conquers the need for it. DeWitt is a master of the motley, tossing subliminal elements of contemporary life and popular culture into his stew of traditional western literature.
Our narrator, Eli Sisters, is a tubby tough-guy with a soft, sweet heart that waits, like a lotus flower, to blossom. He is a John Cusack in cowboy boots: trustworthy, and even a bit of a poet, remarking on the nature of life and love with heavy observations like "Perhaps a man is never meant to be truly happy" and "Why and how do flies make this [buzzing] noise? Does it not sound like shouting to them?" We aren't saturated in his sap because he's also a bad boy (now think Ferris Bueller: He's gonna do what he wants and get away with it), and the violence he perpetrates with calm, steady hands is amplified by his sweetness.
Eli's brother—his source of anxiety, and the man he defends to the death, saying, "Our blood is the same, we just use it differently"—is named Charlie. Charlie is the mean brother, one part Oedipus, one part Odysseus, who could easily be toting a wallet that has "Bad Motherfucker" printed on the front, and who yanks the reins from Eli's open hands, insisting that their boss, the Commodore, has placed him as the lead man of their new job: to locate and kill Hermann Kermit Warm. Just try to tell me it's possible to envision Mr. Warm without thinking about a certain green frog-puppet, and I will tell you that deWitt has you exactly where he wants you.
DeWitt comes off as the rare author whose company you might actually enjoy over dinner—you suspect he doesn't think he knows everything, and might let you get a word in. And I suspect he would, too, not because he's humble, but because he's watching you. While there are one or two moments along the way that feel just slightly too modern, or slightly too stylized, the overall impact of deWitt's recipe is total absorption. This book tastes so good you can't talk, can't get up to use the toilet, can't even make the effort to wipe the drool from your chin, until you've finished it, fully sated. 
