Patrick deWitt releases new novel after whirlwind of ‘The Sisters Brothers’

TORONTO – Vancouver Island native Patrick deWitt says it’s been “a fairly dramatic time” since his second novel, “The Sisters Brothers,” became a literary sensation in 2011.

The comic western won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and a Governor General’s Literary Award. It was also a finalist for the Man Booker and Scotiabank Giller prizes, among others.

Now it’s being made into a film with John C. Reilly as its star and Jacques Audiard as director and screenwriter.

“The attention my last book got was not anticipated and it did take a good period of time for me to feel normal again,” deWitt says from his home in Portland, Ore.

“I recognized at a certain point that things had changed for my career in a way that was quite drastic.”

Through that time, the quality of his life and happiness also “fluctuated a lot,” he says, and he was distracted while writing his much-anticipated new novel, “Undermajordomo Minor.”

The gothic fairy tale follows Lucien (Lucy) Minor, a slight 17-year-old with a penchant for lying, as he leaves his village where he’s always felt an outsider to work for the baron at the chilling Castle Von Aux.

While there, he encounters a series of strange events as he tries to prove himself a man and court a girl who previously dated a soldier involved in a mysterious battle.

“In the middle section of working on the book I became distracted by the fact of the book being difficult and I did feel somewhat rudderless for a while,” says deWitt.

“Then there were all sorts of things going on in my own life that were distracting.”

While the first “30, 40 pages of the book were so easy to write,” the rest “was very nightmarishly slow and complicated,” he says.

As such, deWitt had to get an extension on the deadline for the book. And he took some drastic measures in order to finish on time, including getting rid of the Internet and TV at home.

DeWitt says he started writing the book after a year of penning a different story, which didn’t work out.

He was inspired by Jewish and Eastern European fables — “wonderful, strange, violent, twisted stories” — he’d been reading.

The boredom, melancholy and longing for reinvention that Lucy feels reflects some of deWitt’s experiences at age 17.

“I knew that I wasn’t going to go to college and I joined the workforce around 18 years old and I was sort of working, I had an apartment and I was an ‘adult,'” says deWitt.

“And I remember I felt terribly defeated at times and thinking, ‘Well I suppose this is it,’ and wanting so much more out of my life — adventure and romance and all of the things that Lucy wants.”

Lucy continues a trend that’s developed in deWitt’s writing, he admits.

“I do seem to write about people that are unhappy in their work, a lot,” he says.

“It seems like that’s been the focus really of each of my three novels, and I’m aware of that but it’s not something that I set out to do.”

With the book set for publication on Saturday, deWitt says his life feels more calm and he’s started reading again with the same relish he had as a teen.

“So in that way I feel very fortunate,” says deWitt. “At the age of 40, I’m still very completely in love with the idea of working and the idea of fooling around with words every day.

“I think that it’s good to focus on that and then things like the happiness of my relationship with my son, my friends, my life here in Oregon. Everything is all right. I don’t have any complaints.

“But it has been an erratic four years.”