The Sisters Brothers

What if Kurt Vonnegut wrote a western about a pair of hitman brothers in the wild west?

This book is fun and disturbing so far.

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What a great read. Excellent characterization, wonderfully diverse themes (death, life, morality) that are never wielded with too heavy a hammer. Also one of the few books I've read in a long while that made me laugh out loud.

I have to confess, I do sometimes judge a book by its cover. I'm not a Western reader; this is a first for me and it was the cover that attracted me. It's a really cool image. The inside pages also have a striking graphic style, so that was really fun.

Fortunately the content lived up to the appearance. This was an offbeat, dark comedy, a Tarantino-style western. Two brothers, who are killers for hire. We see the story through the younger brother, Eli, who is full of conflicts: sympathetic, romantic, violent, bad-tempered, immature, thoughtful, and impulsive. Eli has a lot of doubts about their line of work. He and his brother Charlie are familiar but not close, and Charlie is as much of an antagonist to Eli as he is an ally.

The story has a lot of humor and many twists and turns with an unexpected but satisfying ending. I'm surprised by how much I enjoyed it, in fact this was one of my best surprises of the year. This is not my usual genre of choice, but a good story is a good story.

This just never came together for me. Two brothers, Eli and Charlie Sisters, are sent on a mission by the Commodore to kill a man for reasons unstated. The story, ostensibly, follows the brothers as they track the man down, but the actual plot is broken up into small short little vignettes of the brothers as they get into wacky hijinks along the way.

The problem with this is that none of the stuff that happens throughout the book really has any bearing on the end or how they get there. Some of it is amusing in a way, but a lot just left me feeling a little impatient to get on with things. I was never really drawn into the Sisters brothers' quest to kill this man that needed killing, and the characters themselves, despite feeling like there should have been some sort of growth or change, never really went anywhere. I actually read too much into the story from the beginning, and was disappointed to read that things were played straight without too much deviation or plot twists.

I read it. It was a book. I'm done now.

Ultimately, this story reminded me a lot of True Grit in that it is a very personal adventure story. There isn't a lot of glamour to it; it isn't a story about becoming a hero, or accomplishing the unimaginable, or changing the world they live in. It's really just a meandering journey of two brothers. But I really like the feel of the ending: where usually adventure stories end with the hero achieving some climactic task, leaving the reader to wonder how this character will live now that they've ascended above normalcy, in this story, the “final task” feels almost like a side note, and it is truly the return to normalcy which is the true goal and test for the hero. The reader is left with the satisfaction of knowing exactly how the character will live now that his adventure is over.

It's a dusty western narrated in lavish, melancholy tones by Eli Sisters, the younger of the awkwardly named Sisters Brothers. I couldn't help but be reminded of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from Tom Stoppard's play and film - Eli a huskier Gary Oldman as shot by the Coen brothers. He's an odd sort of cowboy assassin, craving the quiet life of a shopkeeper, rendered sentimental over his one-eyed and flagging horse, delighted by the discovery of teeth-brushing and obsessing over his weight, asking for boiled vegetables at the saloon. And yet he's the same guy that finds his boot heel grinding into the shattered skull of a dead prospector.

It ventures close to the surreal with odd little tangents that will have me revisiting this story again in the near future to catch all the little pieces hidden inside.

This was a fast read (two weekend sittings). Engaging and fun, but it never managed to get good. Am I horrible to say that it seemed to be trying too hard to be a Coen brothers film? Someone somewhere described it as failing to congeal, and that is pretty much it. Some great elements, some very entertaining and affecting parts, but never amounting to more than their sum. Maybe I'm missing something but I thought the intermissions were completely out there. The glowing gold was a bit much for me too. A few too many anachronisms among what was otherwise a great historical setting and evocation of the time. Warm‰ЫЄs back story was unnecessary and a cheap way to plump up the ending – I would rather have heard more about their previous assignment. I find the endings of most books disappointing, but here it worked well and ended neatly, which helped me forgive some other parts.

I need to start off by saying that I had to keep turning back to glimpse at the cover throughout this read – I absolutely adore the cover art! 

The Sisters Brothers are guns for hire contracted by their employer, The Commodore. The Commodore is vague in his explanations of why he wants certain people killed, and so it is with the brothers' next job: to kill Hermann Kermit Warm. 

Set at the height of the Gold Rush, The Sisters brothers take off from Oregon and make their trip to San Francisco in search of Warm. They meet some colorful characters along the way, while revealing their own true nature. Charlie Sisters, the cold and calculating brother, aspires to one day be as powerful as The Commodore. Eli Sisters, has a temper of his own, but has a bit more of a conscious, and realizes that he wants more out of life than killing people at The Commodore's command.  The story is not so much about Warm and why he's wanted by the Commodore, but more about the brothers' loyalty for one another and how their relationships, past experiences, and stress from the job shape their moral compasses. The author uses very descriptive images to paint a colorful picture of the time and life of those who lived through the gold rush. Though this era in American history is not one of my favorites, the Sisters Brothers' journey made me want to take a trip back in time and join them on their adventure to San Fran.   

One of my favorite quotes: “I will never be a leader of men, and neither do I want to be one, and neither do I want to be led.” ...And did I mention how cool the cover art is :-D

I mean, it was fine. It had a lot of plot. Little character development until the absolute very end. I didn't feel anything toward either of the main characters (though obviously Eli was meant to be a sympathetic character), and all the action was so matter-of-fact that I didn't really feel anything for any of the Sisters' victims either. The premise got a lot more interesting once Hermann Warm came into the story, but there still wasn't enough here (which feels weird to say, because there was A LOT here).

This novel came highly recommended and deWitt certainly delivered a great tale. The picaresque doesn't get enough airtime, in my opinion, and I thought Eli's journey was poignant riff on the hit-man-on-his-last-job trope. I found the structure of the novel, with intermissions that interrupted the men's travels, to be a bit frustrating–I'm not sure the intermissions fit even as intermissions into the flow of the book. Although I enjoyed reading it, I didn't have a problem setting it aside to pick up other things. This may have something to do with my current lack of enthusiasm for male-centered fiction. I don't read romance novels for women, but on the other hand I just cannot wrap my head around the boys-doing-bad-things-with-boys genre of literature. (portrait of the artist-esque stuff makes me even more uppity). Eli and his brother held no charm or interest for me, and I grew quickly tired of them.