Lucy Jinx: Book One

PRAISE FOR LUCY JINX (Volume One)

A bold … beautifully insightful tale about a poet … D’Stair’s book allows readers to gain an intimate understanding of the hero’s poetic gaze, which sees beyond the seemingly banal surface behavior of others with artistic intentions … this is a tale about a poet’s inner life and, perhaps more accurately, her magpie mind constantly procuring imagery from the outside world to embellish her writing … Lucy’s endearing observations are marked by an almost childlike curiosity and sense of wonder and D’Stair’s use of language is consistently striking, lyrical, and imbued with a similarly playful energy … readers will feel as if they are inside Lucy’s mind, listening to her dictate the narrative of her own life as it happens … a clever take on the creative process and a poet’s obsessive necessity to shape and reshape words to best capture a subject … [Lucy Jinx is] a densely reflexive, intentionally staccato narrative … best enjoyed in short sittings … a cleverly conceived, smartly observant story that delves intriguingly into how a poet thinks. Kirkus Review

About a third of the way through this sprawling, defiantly plotless novel of a young woman poet’s inner life, the protagonist, having left the office trailer in which she works, surprises her co-worker by wandering back in. “Why did I come back in here?” Lucy Jinx asks. Her co-worker, Ariel, replies “Why did you come back in here?” D’Stair characterizes the conversation’s next steps thusly: “’I think I need to get more sleep’ Lucy decides to go with saying and Ariel nods, considers this a real gem of a thing to say, and offers to make Lucy the official Office Sage.” What readers don’t know: Did Lucy forget? Does she have an ulterior motive? And so it goes in Lucy Jinx, a novel of disruptions and disorientation, presenting hundreds of crisp, funny encounters from the mind of a woman who doesn’t quite know—or won’t quite admit—what she’s up to.

Less a stream-of-conscious story than one cataloging, with witty detail, slightly off-kilter everyday incidents, Lucy Jinx charts its hero’s navigation of a quietly bumptious time, as Lucy toils at a magazine published by a grocery-store chain, babysits for the mother who is her landlord, entertains an offer to move in with a woman she has a crush on, and refuses to open a letter that seems important. She seems to yearn for several of the women in her life, but the narrative voice, tied tightly to Lucy’s perspective, tends toward the coy, even about Lucy’s embarrassed predilection for erotic novels like Claudette, The Bashful Girl.

In its descriptive precision, formal play, satiric sharpness, and tragicomic handling of social anxiety and creative processes, the novel, the first of a trilogy, suggests the incisive pleasures of the heyday of Vintage Contemporaries, though the epic length for such a low-key story limits its audience. Still, the relentless succession of compact scenes offers a wealth of gems, powered by sparkling observational comedy, striking language, and Lucy’s own restless—and relatable—editing and rewriting of her own thoughts. Publisher's Weekly/Booklife

PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF PABLO D'STAIR:

The first thing that occurs to you when you pick up a volume of D'Stair is that it has no business being good. No credentials. None of the usual apparatus that tells you a book has appeared: publishers, agents, press releases. The industry didn't cough this one up. The second thing, once you start to turn the slippery pages, is: how the Hell can such good writing come from nowhere? Who the Hell is Pablo D'Stair, anyway? The final note, the one that makes D'Stair a little troubling, is that this writing is a voice inside your head. Nothing can prepare you for that ... Pablo D'Stair is defining the new writer. There is NO ONE else. As reckless as Kerouac's 120-foot trace paper, D'Stair's independence from all of us needs to be studied and celebrated ... D'Stair's late realism needs to be included in any examination of the condition of the novel. Tony Burgess (Pontypool Changes Everything)

D’Stair’s work is written by someone who cares about language - you'd be surprised at the number of novels written by people who don't. It takes a lot of daring and ambition for a writer to tease out a book like this in such minute detail, and D'Stair is committed ... D'Stair's work is too well written to skim ... Somehow again and again you're drawn in ... you get used to the rhythm and follow it because the work is obsessive. We find ourselves in a languid kind of suspense, bracing ourselves... Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho)

I knew he could write, and I suspect he can do about eighty other things as well - if our minds are hamsters on wheels, then Pablo has more hamsters than any of us ... D'Stair doesn't just write like a house afire, he writes like the whole city's burning, and these words he's putting on the page are the thing that can save us all. Stephen Graham Jones (All The Beautiful Sinners)

Over the years I've stopped being astonished at the multifarious things that Pablo D'Stair can do well. Let's just say it: whatever he puts his hand to he accomplishes and with a style and panache that is his alone ... Original. Idiosyncratic. Off-kilter. Strange. The slap-back dialog, the scenes as accurate as if directed by Fritz Lang. This is D'Stair's world. Welcome to it. I envy you if this is your first time in. Corey Mesler (Memphis Movie)