DeWitt brings wit to gothic fiction in Undermajordomo Minor

There is a sense in Patrick deWitt’s third novel of farce playing itself out in a low-oxygen environment.

Patrick deWitt specialises in re-upholstering pulp forms with high-class prose.

Three books into his career it’s now clear that Patrick deWitt’s specialty is re-upholstering pulp forms with high-class prose. Reading the 40-year-old, Canadian-born, Portland, Oregon-based author’s novels is a strange pleasure.

They’re not parodies — although they’re playful and often funny — but nor are they appropriations brushed up to a literary gloss. While the writing is pitch-perfect, you’re always subliminally aware of an idiosyncratic, deadpan wit at work. DeWitt’s first novel, Ablutions (2009), was a barfly memoir in the long tradition of Los Angeles grotesque pioneered by Nathanael West, but with the added conceit of being a series of notes toward a novel. Yet even as it recounted a barman’s seedy-funny spiral amid the desperadoes in a Hollywood bar, its cool second person remained notably unruffled and clear-headed.

However, like most readers, I came to deWitt’s work through his superb 2011 follow-up, The Sisters Brothers. This noir western followed two psychopathic brothers, Charlie and Eli Sisters, on a violent road trip through the gold rush-era American west.

Part slacker Blood Meridian, part Deadwood, this comic novel had a kick that made Michael Ondaatje’s Collected Works of Billy the Kid seem anaemic in both a literal and a literary sense. The tension between its eerie clarity, hilariously superb ear for vernacular, and sheer delight in its own powers added up to a book that read like an invigorated pulp western and its echo, one that knowingly carried the weight of westerns past.

Funny, horrific, and sometimes uncomfortably beautiful, deWitt’s breakout book earned him a place on the Booker shortlist (the first western to make the cut in the prize’s 43-year history) and a slew of North American awards.

Now, in Undermajordomo Minor, he turns his attention to gothic fiction — or rather to gothic parody, which has its own history as a subgenre going back at least as far as Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1804). But in its attention to debauchery, madness and mouldering European castles, deWitt’s novel is much closer in temperament to Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey (1818), whose country house satire featured comically named grotesques such as Mr Listless and Mr Larynx — if you can imagine Peacock filtered through the twee-laconic sensibility of Wes Anderson.

Lucien (Lucy) Minor is a loser, even by the standards of the tiny village of Bury (the quasi-French setting suggests its pronounced, comically, Boo-ree). No one is too concerned when he has a close brush with death, both figuratively and in person, during a severe illness. In fact, his mother and the object of his affections, Marina, are positively relieved when Lucy is soon on a train — complete with quirky thieves — on his way to a job at the Baron Von Aux’s castle. However, when Lucy arrives the baron is nowhere to be seen and no one will tell him what happened to the last undermajordomo. He will be fine, he is told by his boss, the formally deadpan Mr Olderglough (a character who cries out to be played by Bill Murray) so long as he locks his door each night.

Soon Lucy is in love again: with Klara, a local villager, who may be two-timing him with a snarling ruffian among the group of partisans who are part of an unspecified and apparently endless local war.

The novel takes a darker turn when the baron finally does emerge from the castle shadows. While it maintains its quick pace, a genuine horror vibrates beneath its feints and turns. A sense of the abyss beneath a calm prose surface is emerging as another deWittean trait.

When the estranged baronness returns to the love-mad baron, the book enters briefly into Marquis de Sade territory. However, by far the best part of the novel is a dreamy and completely surprising sequence toward its end, when Lucy leaves the bounds of the castle. Just as The Sisters Brothers upped the ante in its final stretch with the striking image of a river turned luminous by a secret gold-detecting formula, Undermajordomo Minor offers us a spectacular and surprising encounter with epic nature. To go into more detail would spoil the plot.

Again, in deWitt’s third novel, the chief pleasure for the reader is the slightly askew energy of its prose; in this instance, campy, quasi-historical dialogue delivered straight. “Tomorrow, will not be a day,” Olderglough tells Lucy during a crisis, “we’ll later cherish or clasp particularly close to our bosom.”

Again, this reminded me overwhelmingly of the dialogue in Anderson’s films, which is old-fashioned yet possessed of a hip knowingness, as if the participants are in on the secret that the words they speak have been carefully hand-crafted. There is a similar sense, too, in deWitt’s third novel of farce playing itself out in a low-oxygen environment, in which every emotional pay-off is unpredictable and oddly flat.

And yet, unlike deWitt’s first two novels, Undermajordomo Minor left me slightly underwhelmed.

Ablutions and The Sisters Brothers were wonderfully uncomfortable — and at times excruciating — books to read because of the tug-of-war between their tonal flatness and rich detail. This was especially the case in The Sisters Brothers, in which the vernacular liveliness of Eli’s voice and the eye-popping texture of his observations left you wondering if he was really as blankly psychopathic as he seemed.

Lucy’s story is a pleasurable enough diversion, but here flatness risks becoming disconcertingly cute thinness. At the end I was left wondering: What, exactly, did I feel?

Delia Falconer is an author and critic.

Undermajordomo Minor

By Patrick deWitt

Granta, 352pp, $27.99