Lucien Minor—or Lucy, as he goes by—is a self-serving and entitled but hapless young man, weak and weak-willed, with no plans for the future. Disturbed by a stranger who appears in his room one night, Lucy goes to the town priest, who arranges a job for him at a castle “in the remote wilderness of the eastern mountain range.” In much the fashion of a fable or a fairy tale, Lucy sets out from home to find his place in the world, and to take the position under the majordomo of the Baron Von Aux estate—and thus the title of Patrick deWitt’s new novel, Undermajordomo Minor. 

Lucy arrives at his new job to find the estate has fallen on hard times. On his first day, his new boss, Mr. Olderglough, tells him, “No one is meant to be here.” The Baron hasn’t been seen in a while, and Lucy is told to lock the door to his meager room at night, or else. Other aspects of his new surroundings go unexplained: there is an area war on the side of the mountain beyond the castle, soldiers intermittently exchanging volleys of fire. A large, possibly bottomless hole—the Very Large Hole—sits just outside town, also lurking at the edge of the story. “The world Lucy is living in isn’t a particularly wholesome place,” deWitt says in an interview. “There’s an element of danger at play throughout the book. Oftentimes it’s vague or in the background, but it was important that it existed for me.”

The fairy-tale framework that deWitt adopts also allows him to effectively tell a love story, or two. While Lucy over-involves himself in the Baron Von Aux’s love for his estranged wife, going so far as to write her a letter, he also falls for Klara, a peasant girl in the village below, who is involved with one of the soldiers fighting on the mountain. Klara has feelings for Lucy as well, and Lucy must eventually decide whether to fight for her. “It seemed that there was room within the fable backdrop to tell a love story unironically and in a fairly straightforward manner, and I liked the idea of approaching that type of story specifically because it’s unfashionable,” deWitt says. “There’s a great deal of irony and nihilism at play in a lot of art in the world generally right now. I thought it might be interesting to try to approach something as old-fashioned as a love story without the armor of irony.” 

Still, Lucy isn’t a fairy-tale protagonist—amusing for his foibles, his intentions are often fueled by his self-righteous attitude. “Lucy has no qualms with telling great grandiose lies to further his own cause at the expense of other people’s feelings. He can be malicious at times,” deWitt says. Here, then, deWitt manages in a seemingly innocent way to frame a less than innocent set of characters. He is able to tell a story that may not be seeking so much to provide a moral message as is it does to talk earnestly about characters who sometimes act in amoral or immoral or human ways—but who are also capable of falling deeply in love.

A mysterious tone pervades Undermajordomo Minor, and the book has the eerie, almost timeless quality of some vivid yet not entirely tangible dream. “The world is occasionally quite perverse and strange, and I think I wanted the reader to feel unease to a degree—but I don’t want to necessarily make the reader uncomfortable,” deWitt says. “I wanted Lucy to feel somewhat out of place—but he is also a natural piece of the puzzle that makes up this world.”

Walter Heymann is a freelance writer and screenwriter who lives in Los Angeles.