Folk tale for adults inventive but offers no moral
After the propulsive, violent, playful, and darkly strange comic adventure of his lauded picaresque Western The Sisters Brothers, Patrick deWitt has opted to journey further afield. There’s not a magic bean or blue ox in sight, but with Under Major Domo Minor he’s telling an idiosyncratic folk tale for adults.
DeWitt opens his flight of fancy in Bury, a village in the crease of a valley somewhere in onceupon-a-time Europe; war, train travel, and union organizers are mentioned but nothing much else grounds the story in a specific time or place. Delightfully artificial, the stylized set pieces of this “scenic locality” recall cinematographic elements of Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, the lair of Count Dracula (in Francis Ford Coppola’s opulent version), Guy Maddin’s artful papier-mâché Tolzbad in Careful, and, yes, here and there, bits of Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein. Throw in the revisiting of fairy tales — à la Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods — and the novel’s “picturesque setting” comes into focus.
True to form, the story involves a young person who travels from home to a far-off land. Feeling bored and unloved, melancholic-but-comely 17-year-old Lucian (Lucy) Minor — he’s “spindly and pale, bordering on sickly” and “a most accomplished liar” — is gratified to accept a job offer at the mountainside estate of mysterious Baron Von Aux. His decision, the assured narrator reports, “led to many things, including but not limited to true love, bitter heartbreak, brightwhite terror of the spirit, and an acute homicidal impulse.”
Before meeting his new boss Mr. Olderglough, an elegantly skeletal man who reminds Lucy of “an aesthete chasing a run of foul luck,” and seeing the gloomy, poorly lit, and largely unused castle, Lucy’s misadventure with thieves on a train opens his eyes to the danger of the outside world. Inside, he’s the majordomo’s assistant, and Mr. Olderglough gives him an important task and a warning: deliver a letter daily (from the lovesick Baron to his runaway bride) and lock himself in his room each night. Lucy’s success with both is partial.
In his ample free time the youth wanders to the nearby village. There, he runs into the puckish train thieves, one of whom has a daughter, Klara, who embodies “an ideal of the purist beauty.” He falls for her, of course. Familiar elements in place, deWitt then throws in a barrage of complications and quirks. Switching between a bizarre work environment (which eventually includes the Baron, a “raving, matter-smeared psychotic”) and Lucy’s troubled love for Klara (who has secrets of her own), the story’s oddities accelerate with the return of the coldhearted Baroness. She inspires a booze-soaked dinner party featuring a sextet of decadent aristocrats and SM orgy props in the form of a huge salami and a lit candle.
With the bloody finale of that “filthy pageant,” impediments to Lucy’s courtship — along with a local geological anomaly (a.k.a. “The Very Large Hole,” which is “very, very large”) — command the under-majordomo’s attention.
While there’s no denying Sidney, B.C.-born and current Portland resident deWitt’s whimsicality and unfettered inventiveness, questions do surface about what it’s all for and about. Like a cake with an excess of icing, the novel risks being simultaneously insubstantial and overladen with decoration.
At one point the Baroness declares, “I for one find it an annoyance when a story doesn’t do what it’s meant to do.” Her comment can be applied to the story in which she takes a role: what is a folk tale for adults circa 2015 meant to do?
If designed as an entertaining showcase of dazzling creativity, deWitt’s pipe dream of a novel can’t be faulted. Beyond that, the matter seems less clear.
Bruno Bettelheim’s classic study of fairy tales, The Uses of Enchantment, argues that for children and adults such tales are fundamentally instructive about the existential problems of selfhood and life; they’re guides of a kind, he writes, addressing fears, moral dilemmas, and the meaning of one’s existence.
Hoping for much of that from Under Major Domo Minor, a reader might feel some of the Baroness’ annoyance.
DeWitt’s not playing the moralist or the teacher. Evidently, he’s content to entertain with a unique take on “Once upon a time.”
Patrick deWitt will appear at the Vancouver Writers Fest this fall. writersfest.bc.ca
Brett Josef Grubisic lectures about literature at UBC. He’s the author of The Age of Cities, This Location of Unknown Possibilities, and (in the spring), From Up