Review: Undermajordomo Minor

Undermajordomo Minor by Patrick deWitt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I feel as if I might be missing the skeleton key to this one.

On the one hand, I really enjoyed its neo-fairy-tale atmosphere. In that light, it reminded me of The Hike and Sendlin Ascending, other books (more successful, I think) that evoke a sense of wonder from almost their opening sentences. Each, this included, captures a tone that makes you want to sit up and listen, a goodnight-story tone for adults.

On the other, I don’t quite see the big picture for this. I’ll do it badly if I try to paraphrase the Russian formalists on fairy tales, but they’re collective point (as I understand it) is that fairy talks function by giving us certain sets of narrative features and then varying them within an implicit larger pattern. That is, there are almost always similar pieces – a mostly innocent boy or girl on a quest, a mentor figure, an adversary, a forbidden place – and they get moved around in different ways to make a different point.

I’m not looking for Aesop-level morals, but I am hoping for a sense of why I was asked to listen to this particular story. Entertaining as this is at every turn, I found myself confused over how its different elements connected.

Early on, there’s a kind of religious sensibility. Lucy, for instance, entertains the possibility of a religious faith that his father rejects and that may or may not be what causes him to live while his father dies. (SPOILER: At the very end of this, we re-encounter the figure Lucy took to be Death and discover it’s merely a brain-damaged beggar…or is it? That point is unresolved in a way that calls us back to the neglected theme without letting us know whether to take that theme too seriously.)

There’s also a classic fairy tale trope around the young protagonist as liar, and Lucy tells a couple potentially incriminating lies along the way. In the end, though, he never seems to suffer for any of them. It may be that the novel is violating the expectation that liars will pay for their untruths, but even that possibility gets more or less washed away in the larger narrative. It’s something that happens but that never gets enough attention for us to come to any conclusion.

While this feels inventive throughout, it doesn’t feel structured in either the way I hope or the ways the Russian formalists describe. As one example, it takes until fairly late in the book for us to be introduced to “the very large hole” which comes to play a central role in the story. It isn’t hard to imagine that deWitt might have had Lucy stumble upon it as soon as he arrived in the area around the castle. For that matter, he might have had Lucy hear about the possibility of suicide in the hole when he was still on the train and denied that story for no apparent reason.

In a potential SPOILER, the entire novel ends as if it’s trailing off more than culminating in something. First, Lucy escapes from the hole, but to what? There’s an emptiness when he returns with almost everyone dead or gone. It isn’t clear to me why that matters; it feels more incidental than cumulative, almost like an excuse for him to leave rather than the real end of the story.

And then the final scene of him composing his own epitaph, while boasting beautiful prose, doesn’t quite seem to tie all the pieces together. There’s a dash of the religious quality, there’s something of the broken-heartedness we’re told to expect, and there’s a promise of more to come. Within those different pieces, though, it’s hard to tell what we’re supposed to privilege as readers.

I hear deWitt’s earlier one is better than this, and I’ll be open to it. After this, which certainly has its merits, my expectations are only middling.


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