Do Cowboys Read Zane Grey?

Undermajordomo Minor. Patrick deWitt. Ecco, 2015. 336 pp. $26.99 (cloth).

And a related question, perhaps more useful: what is the relationship between occupation and genre? Somebody needed to rustle up a herd or two of cattle before Owen Wister could write The Virginian. Dashiell Hammett’s objective narration in The Maltese Falcon would be awfully dry if Sam Spade worked as, say, a data-entry specialist. To risk obscene obviousness: many of our sturdiest genres—strains we might call “earthbound fiction”—simply wouldn’t exist without the jobs, the work, they dramatize.

Few contemporary writers exploit the fictional possibilities of work as skillfully (or prolifically) as Patrick deWitt, who has, in the first decade of his career, published four pleasingly disparate novels, each discreetly concerned with occupation. His 2009 debut about a Los Angeles bartender, Ablutions: Notes for a Novel (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), features a barroom existentialism and lived precision that reflect deWitt’s own years tending bar. In The Sisters Brothers (Ecco, 2011), undoubtedly the author’s most well-known novel, he rouses the western, depicting a pair of sibling hitmen who’ve been hired to “find and kill a prospector in California named Hermann Kermit Warm.” More recently, French Exit (Ecco, 2018) foregrounds moneyed characters—and their pointed rejection of occupation—to fashion a contemporary comedy of manners.

But deWitt’s third novel, Undermajordomo Minor (Ecco, 2015), represents his most radical approach to job and genre. Crossbreeding fairy-tale, gothic, courtship, and comic traditions—and citing in its acknowledgments influences as diverse as Thomas Bernhard, Jean Rhys, Roald Dahl, Italo Calvino, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Werner Herzog, and Eudora Welty—the novel tells the story of Lucien Minor (Lucy, for short), whom we meet as he prepares to leave his dreary and indistinct rural homeland. Asked what he wants out of life by an abstrusely magical, burlap-clad visitor, Lucy answers, “Something to happen.” This line, apparently irresistible to reviewers, demonstrates the faintly self-reflexive narration deWitt writes as well as any contemporary author this side of Tom Drury. What happens, to the delight of Lucy and the reader, is that a local priest helps him secure work at an obscure castle “in the remote wilderness of the eastern mountain range.” The job’s official title is undermajordomo—Lucy is, in more straightforward terms, a butler’s butler.

His employment transports the novel from not-particularly-magical fairy tale to farcical gothic. The castle contains winding stone staircases, cobwebby ballrooms, and a madperson—descended from the attic presumably—who mutters in dim, echoey corridors. Lucy’s superior, Majordomo Olderglough, reminds him with growing urgency to lock his bedroom door at night. DeWitt traverses this generic terrain with gleeful energy, just invested enough in the archetypal to exploit its comedic potential, but not, you know, too invested.

Lucy’s duties include restocking the larder, serving tea to Mr. Olderglough, and dusting neglected quarters. His most important task, it seems, is to provide company for Mr. Olderglough, who’s grown lonely during the castle’s decline. When Lucy asks, on his first day, about the nature of his duties, Olderglough responds characteristically: “Easier asked than answered. [ . . . ] For our days here are varied, and so our needs are also varied. On the whole, I think you’ll find the workload to be light in that you will surely have ample free time. But then there comes the question of what one does with his free time. I have occasionally felt that this was the most difficult part of the job; indeed, the most difficult part of being alive, wouldn’t you say, boy?” Like most virtuosos of comic dialogue, deWitt is a master of miscommunication. He’s particularly sensitive to how language, for some of us, serves as defense mechanism—word as wedge, if you will—and he delights in pressing on overly formal and familiar phrases in a way that undercuts their capacity to aggrandize. Take, for instance, this conversation between Lucy and his ex-girlfriend, just before he leaves for the castle:

“I’m to be undermajordomo.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s akin to the majordomo, more or less.”
“It sounds to be less.”
“I will be working in concert with him.”
“Beneath him, that’s what it sounds like.”

The effect, though far from naturalistic, rings true for what it reveals about deWitt’s characters and, by extension, about human nature—that we are (at least those of us who haven’t achieved perennial enlightenment) prone to one-upmanship.

Often what’s disputed is the language itself; the novel presents numerous examples of what might be described as semantic dialogue, like the following discussion about the gunfire Lucy keeps hearing:

“Sir, there is a war taking place outside the castle.”
Mr. Olderglough rolled his eyes. “It’s not a war,” he said.
“Bullets are flying through the air.”
“That doesn’t make it a war. A war is a much bigger production. This is a trifle by comparison.”

Collectively, these exchanges move beyond comically petty power struggles to something larger, something existential, an anxiety about the limits of language—how absurd it is that “words are,” as Beckett may or may not have actually said, “all we have.”

A similar anxiety tinges deWitt’s depiction of labor throughout the novel. His project isn’t to critique the awful particulars of late-capitalist life but to question the value of work—especially hard work. As the novel unfolds, Lucy spends more and more time in the village, courting a fair maiden named Klara. During a lengthy but absorbing digression, Klara’s father, the village thief, turns his deathbed into a soapbox, vividly recounting his conversion to larceny-as-lifestyle for an audience of village children. The section is titled “Memel’s Lesson to the Children.” The lesson: “There is nothing noble in suffering, nothing worthwhile in mindless labors.”

Occupations tend to be fraught with hazards, after all, and in Lucy’s case, the chief risk is falling in hopeless, ruinous love. The castle’s precipitous decline, we come to understand, parallels that of the baron, who’s been unceremoniously abandoned by the baroness. Lucy learns that his predecessor, Mr. Broom, turned to self-injury in the aftermath of a blustery affair; he jumped into the Very Large Hole, a geological formation proximate to the castle. The castle’s residents—even those who aren’t martyrs to romance—succumb to despair. In these middle chapters, in other words, the novel transforms into full-blooded gothic romance. Love and gloom lay waste.

When Lucy himself yields to such maladies, the novel’s generic evolution continues. He too ends up at the bottom of the Very Large Hole, where he’s trapped—along with two other lovelorn men—in lightless, labyrinthine tunnels. Here the man-versus-nature struggle is stripped to the barest elements: rocks, water, sand, darkness. To survive, Lucy gnaws through raw fish bellies; he navigates treacherous underground waterways. He harbors, all the while, a single animating impulse: his abiding love for Klara. In these last chapters, the gothic tropes give way to something more straightforwardly naturalistic, arguably more American than European. Love’s dangers, its violence, calcify into the craggy passages of this final movement—a Jack London expedition as allegory for romance.

These generic contours—and their corresponding tonal deviations—make the novel uncommonly difficult to classify. Daniel Handler, writing for the New York Times, suggests that the work resides “in a genre we all know but maybe can’t quite define,” calling it “a melting pot of assorted old European scraps, cooked up into something that makes superb and utter sense as long as you’re not a stickler for authenticity.” NPR’s Colin Dwyer proposes that deWitt is “experimenting with genre here, taking elements you might expect to see in a fairy tale from the Brothers Grimm, or in one of Roald Dahl’s darker fables, and scrambling them according to his liking.”

What early reviews largely overlook, however, is that this story— like each of deWitt’s novels—is a variant of the picaresque. Whether their mode of transportation is horse, car, cruise ship, or train, deWitt’s characters are always eager to leave town. But Undermajordomo Minor distinguishes itself in that once Lucy arrives at the castle, the destinations turn out to be aesthetic rather than geographic. This movement works as a result of Lucy’s usefully loose job, which provides not only the occasion but also the vehicle for story. It offers structural closure too—upon emerging from the Very Large Hole, Lucy visits the castle to resign from his position.

Thus we begin and end with work, and Lucy’s occupation, a ludicrous invention designed to “make something happen,” becomes, finally, the pragmatic anchor for deWitt’s cavalier vessel. Undermajordomo Minor reveals that the relationship between jobs and genre in fiction need not be tidy; it also suggests that writers gain more from fictionalized work than do their characters. Near novel’s end we discover that Lucy—after months of labor, depicted over 250-plus pages—has never been paid. This moment serves as a joke, of course, but it also uncovers a crucial truth about fictionalized occupations, no matter the genre: in the currency of novels, money is always less valuable than desire.

Read more from Issue 17.1.