He's just a little more squirrelly, I guess you'd say, than Eli Sisters. He lies, and he's envious of other people.

Lucy is, I think, a little more - well, he's not as noble. And it's become apparent to me that my last protagonist, Eli, is a more instantly likable person for most readers, in spite of the fact that he's an assassin. People are comparing this book, my new one, to my last one. Well, the question of likability - it's a funny one. And in fact they're engaged to be married, but of course Lucy finds all this out later. There's a vastly superior physical specimen named Adolphus, who's sort of an unfairly heroic partisan soldier lurking in the mountains - who, when he's not being shot at or shooting at his mysterious oppressors, he's wooing Klara. And there's just something about her profile and her carriage, you know, that he's really just lost to her to her right away. And it is the most cliched of things it's love at first sight. This is just somebody that he finds beguiling and charmed by. It's a fairly traditional and straightforward love story, I feel. Thus it is that Lucy leaves home and becomes Undermajordomo Minor.ĭeWitt, who was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for his previous novel, The Sisters Brothers, joined NPR's Scott Simon to talk likability, the flaws with optimism - and how his hopes for a writing career once teetered on the edge of a trash can. Then, Lucy (short for Lucien Minor) gets himself a job offer: assistant to the majordomo at the Castle Von Aux, in the remote east of a kingdom that's in the grip of some indefinable and endless war. Not much has been going right for him in his hometown village. At the heart of Patrick DeWitt's new novel is a young man named Lucy - a hapless liar who's been unlucky in his loves, his labors and even his lies.