Quick Take
- Narration: John Pruden captures Eli Sisters’s quietly observant voice with the dry wit the novel requires, making the dark material genuinely funny without softening it.
- Themes: Brotherhood and moral difference, violence and its costs, the California Gold Rush’s human wreckage
- Mood: Darkly comic and unexpectedly tender, with a melancholy that accumulates slowly
- Verdict: A literary western that earns its Man Booker Prize shortlisting by finding genuine humanity in two professional killers, delivered in prose that is original and strange in the best sense.
I came to The Sisters Brothers later than I should have. The novel had been on my list since its Man Booker Prize shortlisting in 2011, but it was only during a recent stretch of audiobook exploration that I finally got to it. I was not prepared for how funny it was. Literary fiction about hired killers traveling the Gold Rush-era American West is not typically comic territory, but Patrick deWitt is doing something very specific here: he is writing about violence from the perspective of someone who performs it professionally but finds it faintly distasteful, and that gap between action and sensibility is where all the comedy and the sadness live.
The synopsis attached to this edition is minimal, which reflects the copy rather than the book itself. The Sisters Brothers is a significant novel with a particular and original voice, and it deserves more than a placeholder description. What it actually is: a road novel set in Oregon and California in 1851, narrated by Eli Sisters, the younger of two brothers who work as contract killers for a powerful figure called the Commodore. The brothers are traveling to San Francisco to kill a man named Hermann Kermit Warm, and the journey is the novel.
Our Take on The Sisters Brothers
DeWitt’s greatest achievement here is the voice. Eli narrates in a register that is formally heightened without being archaic, precise without being stiff, and consistently aware of its own irony without being smug about it. He is a man who shoots people for money and who also worries about his horse’s feelings, reads his own emotional responses with puzzled attention, and maintains a running private critique of his brother Charlie’s lack of consideration. The comedy that results is not gags. It is character comedy of a very high order.
One reviewer describes deWitt as clever and unique in his storytelling, and his characters as different than any met in literature or in life. That is accurate, and the distinctive quality of the prose is what makes this a novel rather than a genre exercise. The western trappings are genuine, the Gold Rush setting is rendered with period accuracy, but the book is interested in something more intimate than frontier adventure: it is interested in what it costs a person to do terrible things for a living, and whether that person can still be decent in some meaningful sense.
Charlie Sisters, Eli’s older brother, presents a useful contrast. Where Eli is reflective and faintly reluctant, Charlie is efficient and amused. The brothers are not mirror images; they are genuinely different people who happen to share blood and a profession, and their relationship across the journey is the emotional center of the book. The conversations between them, the silences, the accumulated history that informs how they speak and do not speak to each other, are written with novelistic precision that the western genre rarely achieves.
Why Listen to This Novel in Audio
John Pruden’s narration is well-suited to Eli’s dry, precise voice. He finds the comedy in the material without pushing for laughs, which is the right approach. deWitt’s sentences are calibrated precisely enough that over-reading would wreck them, and Pruden resists that temptation. The result is a narration that trusts the prose, which is what literary fiction needs from its narrators.
The novel’s rhythms are well-suited to audio. DeWitt writes in a way that accumulates quietly, building its emotional effects slowly and letting the comedy arrive as a natural byproduct of Eli’s particular mind encountering the world. That cumulative quality works particularly well in the listening experience, where you have time to register the texture of each scene before the next arrives.
What to Watch For in the Tonal Shifts
The novel gets darker as it goes, and listeners who settle into its early comic mode should be prepared for a genuine shift in the third act. The melancholy that was always underneath the comedy becomes more visible, and the ending, which arrives quietly, requires a reader who has been paying attention to what the book is actually about rather than just enjoying the surface pleasures. This is not a weakness. It is the novel doing what it set out to do. But it is worth knowing that this is a book with emotional ambitions beyond its comedic tone.
Who Should Listen to The Sisters Brothers
This audiobook works beautifully for readers of literary fiction who have not yet discovered deWitt, and for anyone interested in what the western genre can do when a writer with genuine literary ambitions takes it seriously. Fans of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men who want something with more comedy, or readers of Charles Portis’s True Grit who appreciate first-person narrators with deeply individual voices, will find a natural home here.
Listeners who want plot momentum above all else may find the novel’s meandering, episodic structure frustrating. The journey is the point, and the meaning accumulates in the texture of the journey rather than in its destination. Patience with digression and character is required, and rewarded.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is The Sisters Brothers suitable for listeners who do not usually enjoy westerns?
Yes. The western setting and period are accurate, but the novel is primarily interested in its characters’ psychology and the relationship between the brothers rather than in genre conventions. Readers who normally avoid westerns but enjoy dark literary comedy and character studies will find it accessible.
How dark is the violence in this audiobook, and does it conflict with the comic tone?
The violence is present but handled with a matter-of-fact quality that is part of the novel’s distinctive register. It is not gratuitous, but it is not softened either. The comedy and the darkness coexist in the way they do in real life, which is part of what makes the novel interesting.
Does John Pruden’s narration capture deWitt’s specific prose style effectively?
Yes. Pruden reads Eli’s voice with the dry precision the narration requires, finding the comedy without reaching for it and handling the tonal shifts as the novel darkens in its final section. He trusts the prose rather than supplementing it.
How does this compare to True Grit by Charles Portis, since both feature first-person western narrators with unusual voices?
Both novels derive their power from narrators with strongly individual and formally heightened voices. Portis’s Mattie Ross is righteous and severe; deWitt’s Eli Sisters is reflective and gently bewildered. Both books use voice to make the western genre do something more interior and literary than standard adventure fiction. The Sisters Brothers is probably the darker and funnier of the two.
