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At once gargantuan and miniaturist THE LUCY JINX TRILOGY is an intimate Epic, spanning eight years in the life and innermost mind of the titular poet as she navigates ambitions, friendships, lovers, and, above all, her monstrous, psychically tumultuous relationships with language, identity, and purpose; a portrait-of-the-artist equal parts romance, comedy, and existential horror-show.
NOTE: Each volume of The LUCY JINX TRILOGY is a self-contained, standalone novel. This is the fully revised and updated 2023 edition of Book One of the series.
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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.
Takeaway: Playful, inventive, and funny epic of a poet’s antsy everyday life.
Comparable Titles: Susan Daitch’s The Colorist, Nicholson Baker.
Production grades
Cover: B
Design and typography: B
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A-
Marketing copy: A-