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THE LIBRARIANIST

by Patrick deWitt ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 4, 2023

A quietly effective and moving character study.

An old man’s routines are interrupted by a woman in pink in this wistful fable.

Bob Comet, a retired librarian, is 71 and has lived an unremarkable life in Portland, Oregon, in a mint-colored house that belonged to his late mother. “He had no friends, per se; his phone did not ring, and he had no family.” The year is 2005, and this dreary state of affairs stems partly from the fact that shortly after he married her in 1959, Bob’s wife ran off with his best friend. Things begin to change for the retiree when he encounters a woman about his age in a pink sweatsuit staring at the refrigerated beverages in a 7-Eleven. After he learns that she is a resident of a nearby senior center and returns her there, he makes a startling discovery. The narrative shifts to Bob in his 20s, when he becomes a librarian and meets his wife-to-be and the man who would become his best friend, before the two betrayed him. The story shifts again, to Bob at age 11, when he ran away from home and had an adventure with two eccentric women who performed elaborate stage shows. They are among the several lesser characters who provide color and light in this gray tale. DeWitt has gained a following with the black comedy of his past three novels— French Exit (2018), Undermajordomo Minor (2015), and The Sisters Brothers (2011). The new book is different, marked by the resigned melancholy surrounding Bob, a mood not always understated: “There had been whole eras of Bob’s working life where he knew a lamentation at the smallness of his existence.” He brings to mind John Williams’ Stoner and Thoreau’s chestnut about “lives of quiet desperation,” but it is telling that deWitt chooses to capture him at times when his life takes a turn.

Pub Date: July 4, 2023

ISBN: 9780063085121

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: April 10, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION

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New York Times Bestseller

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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by Kristin Hannah

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BOOK TO SCREEN

SEEN & HEARD

BY ANY OTHER NAME

by Jodi Picoult ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 20, 2024

A vibrant tale of a remarkable woman.

Who was Shakespeare?

Move over, Earl of Oxford and Francis Bacon: There’s another contender for the true author of plays attributed to the bard of Stratford—Emilia Bassano, a clever, outspoken, educated woman who takes center stage in Picoult’s spirited novel. Of Italian heritage, from a family of court musicians, Emilia was a hidden Jew and the courtesan of a much older nobleman who vetted plays to be performed for Queen Elizabeth. She was well traveled—unlike Shakespeare, she visited Italy and Denmark, where, Picoult imagines, she may have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—and was familiar with court intrigue and English law. “Every gap in Shakespeare’s life or knowledge that has had to be explained away by scholars, she somehow fills,” Picoult writes. Encouraged by her lover, Emilia wrote plays and poetry, but 16th-century England was not ready for a female writer. Picoult interweaves Emilia’s story with that of her descendant Melina Green, an aspiring playwright, who encounters the same sexist barriers to making herself heard that Emilia faced. In alternating chapters, Picoult follows Melina’s frustrated efforts to get a play produced—a play about Emilia, who Melina is certain sold her work to Shakespeare. Melina’s play, By Any Other Name , “wasn’t meant to be a fiction; it was meant to be the resurrection of an erasure.” Picoult creates a richly detailed portrait of daily life in Elizabethan England, from sumptuous castles to seedy hovels. Melina’s story is less vivid: Where Emilia found support from the witty Christopher Marlowe, Melina has a fashion-loving gay roommate; where Emilia faces the ravages of repeated outbreaks of plague, for Melina, Covid-19 occurs largely offstage; where Emilia has a passionate affair with the adoring Earl of Southampton, Melina’s lover is an awkward New York Times theater critic. It’s Emilia’s story, and Picoult lovingly brings her to life.

Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024

ISBN: 9780593497210

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024

LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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by Jodi Picoult & Jennifer Finney Boylan

by Jodi Picoult

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The Librarianist

Patrick dewitt.

352 pages, Hardcover

First published July 4, 2023

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“The language-based life of the mind was a needed thing in the syrup-slow era of our elders, but who has time for it now? There aren’t any metalsmiths anymore, and soon there’ll be no authors, publishers, booksellers — the entire industry will topple into the sea, like Atlantis; and the librarianists will be buried most deeply in the silt.”

He had no friends, per se; his phone did not ring, and he had no family, and if there was a knock on the door, it was a solicitor; but this absence didn’t bother him, and he felt no craving for company. Bob had long given up on the notion of knowing anyone, or of being known. He communicated with the world partly by walking through it, but mainly by reading about it. Bob had read novels exclusively and dedicatedly from childhood and through to the present.

“Why must you ask me questions I cannot know the answer to?” “It’s that I want to know things,” said Ida. “We all want to, and we are every one of us disappointed, and we shall die not knowing it,” June sighed. “I do wish it had announced itself. I feel rather nude, frankly. I hope we haven’t named any old scandals, or created any new ones.” Ida looked up, through time, rearward. “No,” she said. “Well, then, let us accept that we shan’t be alone, as was our hope. In brighter news, however, it does appear the boy is mute, perhaps deaf into the bargain, and so we can easily pretend to be alone if not actually live out the reality of aloneness.”

“Someday, Bob, when you’re an aged specimen like me, and you find yourself suddenly enamored of folding the laundry or edging your lawn, remember your long-gone friend Leslie More telling you to accept whatever happiness passes your way, and in whatever form.” “Okay,” said Bob. “Because it’s a fool who argues with happiness, while the wiser man accepts it as it comes, if it comes at all.” “Okay.”

There had been whole eras of Bob’s working life where he knew a lamentation at the smallness of his existence, but now he understood how lucky he had been to have inhabited his position. Across the span of nearly fifty years he had done a service in his community and also had been a part of it; he had seen the people of the neighborhood coming and going, growing up, growing old and dying. He had known some of them too, hadn’t he? It was a comfort to him, to dream of the place. His favorite dream was that he was alone and it was early in the morning, and he was setting up for the day, and all was peaceful and still and his shoes made no sound as he walked across the carpeting, an empty bus shushing past on the damp street.

"Bob wondered if her life was small in the way his was small."

He had no friends, per se; his phone did not ring, and he had no family, and if there was a knock on the door it was a solicitor; but this absence didn’t bother him, and he felt no craving for company. Bob had long given up on the notion of knowing anyone, or of being known. He communicated with the world partly by walking through it, but mainly by reading about it. Bob had read novels exclusively and dedicatedly from childhood and through to the present.

Connie, who had been Bob’s wife, had sometimes asked him why he read quite so much as he did. She believed Bob was reading beyond the accepted level of personal pleasure and wondered if it wasn’t symptomatic of a spiritual or emotional deformity. Bob thought her true question was, Why do you read rather than live?

The next day Bob returned to the beach to practice his press rolls. The first performance was scheduled to take place thirty-six hours hence; with this in mind, Bob endeavored to arrive at a place where he could achieve the percussive effect without thinking of it. An hour and a half passed, and he paused, looking out to sea and having looking-out-to-sea thoughts. He imagined he heard his name on the wind and turned to find Ida leaning out the window of the tilted tower; her face was green as spinach puree, and she was waving at him that he should come up. Bob held the drum above his head, and she nodded that he should bring it with him.

“Bob was certain that a room filled with printed matter was a room that needed nothing.” [Ethan:] “‘I keep meaning to get to books but life distracts me.’ ‘See, for me it’s just the opposite,’ Bob said.” “All his life he had believed the real world was the world of books; it was here that mankind’s finest inclinations were represented.”

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Patrick deWitt Is a 21st-Century Mark Twain

The great chronicler of american weirdos is back with his warmest novel yet, the librarianist ..

In another, even less satisfactory timeline than our own, The Librarianist , Patrick deWitt’s new novel about an introverted bookworm making a late-life bid to belong, would have a much sweeter center and a very different title. It would be called something ornate, featuring the main character’s three-syllable, faintly antiquated surname—something like The Five Secret Lives of Waldo Murgatroyd or Henry Fitzpatrick Takes the Bus . It would be a misty-eyed paean to the cozy pleasures of reading and the fragrance of old books. It would be very popular with librarians.

Librarians will probably be annoyed by The Librarianist , whose title character, the unmeteoric Bob Comet, conforms to every stereotype of the breed: methodical, reserved, staid. The novel opens in 2005, with 71-year-old Bob—retired after 45 years working in the same Portland, Oregon, branch library—now spending his days walking and reading, dreaming of a seaside hotel he visited just once, at the age of 11. Unmarried, solitary but not exactly lonely, Bob can’t figure out why the dream is suffused with an emotion exactly like “the onset of profound romantic love,” despite the fact that he hadn’t fallen in love at the Hotel Elba. The dream arrives like a bit of atmosphere, the melancholy reflectiveness of an old man’s waning years, but it is really the novel’s central question: What did Bob Comet find at the Hotel Elba and then yearn for the rest of his life?

The Librarianist

By Patrick deWitt. Ecco.

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The Librarianist is a gentler work than deWitt’s best-known novel, The Sisters Brothers , and the two books that followed it, French Exit and Undermajordomo Minor , each one an elegant vamp on a particular literary genre—the Western, the comedy of manners, and the gothic—with plenty of sharp edges. His first novel, Ablutions , based on his experiences tending bar at a fading Hollywood watering hole, established the essential, abiding signature of his fiction: its easygoing habit of allowing itself to be hijacked by characters who are just passing through, each with his own tale to tell. The effect is very much like hanging out at a bar and being buttonholed by a series of eccentric regulars.

It’s very American, this form of storytelling, reminiscent of Mark Twain, the writer deWitt resembles most. Initially a journalist, Twain never entirely abandoned the notion that his job was to wander around collecting and recording the yarns of people on the fringes of an adolescent nation. This anecdotal style suits a society of transients who wash up together of an evening, share their remarkable experiences, and then move on. It’s a mode suited to tall tales and one version or another of sales pitches, some sketchier than others.

Bob Comet, though: He’s not the kind of guy likely to have such encounters. He doesn’t go to bars, and his social life consists largely of glimpsing other people’s lives through their front windows and hoping for some exciting event like a house fire. Bob, deWitt writes, “had long given up on the notion of knowing anyone, or of being known. He communicated with the world partly by walking through it, but mainly by reading about it.” If The Librarianist were the sort of novel I described earlier, Bob’s reticence would be regarded fondly, as a sign of sensitivity requiring only that he find—perhaps through the intermediary of a precocious child or a mischievous animal—similarly tender, bookish souls with whom to commune.

But The Librarianist is not actually a book about books and the fine qualities of the people who love them. Books seldom feature in the novel, and when they do, they’re typically inadequate to Bob’s needs. When Bob encounters a stray, catatonic resident of a nearby senior center in the 7-Eleven and shepherds her back, he offers to volunteer there. His big idea is to read to the residents, beginning with Poe and moving on to a selection of Russian authors. (“Everybody likes to be told a story,” he explains to the center’s frazzled manager. “Okay, but do they?” she replies.) He prefaces his Russian readings with a talk about how “We read as a way to come to grips with the randomness of our being alive. To read a book by an observant, sympathetic mind is to see the human landscape in all its odd detail, and the reader says to him or herself, Yes, that ’s how it is, only I didn ’t know it to describe it . There’s a fraternity achieved, then: we are not alone.” This overly familiar sentiment makes no impression on his inattentive audience. To Bob’s dismay, they mostly wander out of his reading before he finishes.

The manager suggests that Bob simply show up every day, that his simple but constant presence might be more comforting to people “in a state of letting go” than high-flown declarations of the power of literature. He gets to know an ugly man who used to be very handsome and a woman convinced that her space heater is an “oracle” foretelling her eternal damnation. These friendships, and a startling revelation about the catatonic woman Bob rescued from the convenience store, prompt a series of flashbacks to the death of his unmarried mother in the 1950s, to his brief courtship and marriage a few years later, and finally, to his four-day adventure as a runaway at the Hotel Elba in 1945.

The first two of these flashbacks exquisitely illustrate Bob’s distance from the people in his life. Even when living in the same house as his mother and then his wife, he always seems to be watching them through a window from the outside. Bob’s great fear, as he falls in love with Connie, a young woman he meets at his library, is that she will in turn fall for his only friend, the charming and catastrophically handsome Ethan. As with most great fears, this one has a way of making itself come true. The Librarianist offers no firsthand account of the romance that kindles between Connie and Ethan, just interactions that Bob glimpses from a distance, small gestures, inexplicable shifts in mood, the implied significance of a bit of red string. The reader can only imagine how the pair resist and then succumb to a love that forces them to betray a man they both cherish, and it is enough to break your heart.

The Librarianist becomes truly Twainian—and deWittian—in its third flashback, as the 11-year-old Bob runs away from home and meets a pair of women en route to the Hotel Elba. There, the traveling “thespians”—deWitt makes the most of the suggested rhyme here—plan to stage a performance involving a full-size guillotine, trained dogs, and witch costumes. At the hotel, Bob will meet an antisocial horticulturalist, a lovelorn chambermaid, and an ironical sheriff, each given a moment to belly up to the novel’s bar and take over. But it’s June and Ida, the thespians, who are the true stars here, an homage to the Duke and the King from Huckleberry Finn , but a benign one. Two of deWitt’s novels, The Sisters Brothers and French Exit , have been made into indie films, with deWitt writing the screenplay for the latter, and you can see why. No one writes loopier, funnier dialogue:

Ida told Bob, “She dreamed you were set upon by tramps.” June scowled at Ida. “You know, Bob,” she said, “I support your project in every way. But I’m uneasy at the thought of one so young as yourself being alone in the world. Because the world sometimes is a complicated place.” Ida said, “You always hear about tramps buggering children.” “Ida, Ida,” said June. “What? You do hear about it. Forewarned is forearmed.” June patted Bob’s arm. “You’ll not be buggered, Bob.” “But if you are,” said Ida, “don’t say we didn’t warn you.”

DeWitt’s dialogue oscillates between an easy vernacular and old-fashioned flourishes (“one so young as yourself”), a style perfectly suited to the Western milieu of The Sisters Brothers , but that tends to give his other novels an unreal tinge. For all their dire warnings, however, June and Ida are much kinder than the ruthless and rude characters who have populated those earlier books. Even Connie and Ethan, who ruin Bob for the majority of his adult life, are agonized by their transgression. French Exit and especially Undermajordomo Minor are essentially satirical works, and The Librarianist is not. That doesn’t make it as sentimental as all those popular novels about curmudgeonly booksellers whose hearts are melted by true love and good friends, but the warmth that deWitt exhibits here gives this one an emotional staying power his earlier books lack.

Is it possible to change the contours of your personality late in life, with, as the woman with the prophetic space heater puts it, “the knowledge of a long dusk coming on”? The final scene in The Librarianist features an answer as modest as it is revolutionary, but deWitt has spent the preceding pages making the oxymoron of a modest revolution utterly believable. The answer is: maybe a little bit. Maybe enough.

How does a man become as average as this?

The delightfully quirky new novel from the Booker-shortlisted author of The Sisters Brothers follows a retired librarian called Bob

There is clearly something wrong with Patrick deWitt – as a writer, I mean, not as a person. No one ever seems to have told him to stay in his lane, to not mess with his niche, or to just relax and write the same old book again and again.

The Librarianist is deWitt’s fifth novel. Stylistically, there are certainly resemblances to his previous books – they’re all rather funny, in a quirky kind of way – but each one is unique. One might think of the Canadian author’s career as composed of a series of extraordinarily vivid tessellated patterns. If you’ve never read him, think of him as the literary equivalent of, say, the filmmaker Wes Anderson: deadpan tales of dysfunction and disappointment, heavy on the whimsy, light, bright, beguiling, perhaps a little solicitous, and yet also always somehow sad.

Having written a Western (The Sisters Brothers, 2011, made into a not very good film starring Joaquin Phoenix), a mother-son mystery (French Exit, 2018, made into an excellent film starring Michelle Pfeiffer, for which deWitt also wrote the screenplay), a work of gothic fantasy (Undermajordomo Minor, 2015), and a second-person narrative about a bunch of Hollywood barflies (Ablutions, 2009), the new book is all about a journey of discovery for a retired librarian named Bob.

Bob is 71 years of age “and not unhappy”. He goes for long walks. He has no friends. He has no family. He has spent his life as a reader. “He communicated with the world partly by walking through it, but mainly by reading about it. Bob had read novels exclusively and dedicatedly from childhood and through to the present.” Bob’s life is at a bit of a dead end.

But then he starts volunteering at the Gambell-Reed Senior Center, where he meets a classic deWittean cast of characters, one of whom holds the key to unlocking his unlikely backstory. What follows is a long and entertaining series of encounters with delightful odd bods, deadbeats and drolls, each of them adding a little more to our understanding of dear old Bob.

There is, for example, the ­inappropriately flirtatious Brighty; there’s Maria, “sly to the world’s foolishness”; and there’s Jill, ­struggling to cope with pain: “She spoke of a wish to measure it, a ­volume or weight she might assign it, to share with doctors, with strangers, bus drivers.” 

There are dozens of them. There’s Linus Webster, a man stuck in a wheelchair, whose profound ugliness of spirit and of countenance hides a past as “a musclebound giant, six and a half feet tall and without flaw to a point approaching the surreal”. There’s Bob’s old boss in the library, Miss Ogilvie, who saw it as her life’s purpose “to maintain the sacred nonnoise of the library environment”. There’s Eileen, who “was not charming but had contemplated charm and could perform a version of it that was convincing so long as you didn’t inspect it very closely”. And there are Chance and Chicky Bitsch (“jolly drinkers and avid bridge players and bowlers”); Georgie, whose “pastime was viciousness”; and June and Ida, who are “playwrights and producers and directors and designers and stagehands and prop masters and dog trainers and dogs”.

In contrast to them all is Bob, a “steady, hand-on-the-tiller type”, a man possessed of a “natural enjoyment of modest accomplishment”, a man firmly set at a midpoint between extremes. The Librarianist, among other things, is an exploration of how a man might end up so determinedly mild and middling: “Bob had not been ­particularly good or bad in his life. Like many, like most, he rode the center line, going out of his way to perform damage against the un­deserving but never arcing toward helping the deserving, either.” DeWitt’s great gift lies in his ability to depict the Everyman in extremis – heroism hidden in plain sight.

It would not perhaps be giving too much away to reveal that at least a part of Bob’s great caution and introversion is that many years ago his wife, Connie, ran away with his best friend, Ethan Augustine, and that in the Gambell-Reed Senior Center his past returns to confront him. “To be hurt so graphically by the only two people he loved was such a perfect cruelty… he couldn’t comprehend it as a reality.” But it is reality. Life – alas and hurrah – cannot be forever avoided.

The Librarianist is published by Bloomsbury at £18.99. To order your copy for £16.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop

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The Librarianist by Patrick deWitt, review: Some of the loveliest writing of 2023

The everyday comings and goings of bob comet, a 71-year-old retired librarian are relayed in patrick dewitt's latest novel.

The first section of Patrick deWitt ’s latest novel, The Librarianist , features perhaps some of the loveliest fiction writing of 2023. It spans 64 pages, and relays in quiet and poignant detail the everyday comings and goings of Bob Comet, a 71-year-old retired librarian who has lived an unremarkable life – in Portland, Oregon, mostly – and continues to do so today. “He has no friends, per se,” deWitt writes. “His phone did not ring, and he had no family.”

He continues to live in the mint-coloured house that belonged to his late mother, and he staves off loneliness due to the fact that the house is book-lined. One cannot be lonely, the author suggests, if your life is filled with reading. “To read a book by an observant, sympathetic mind,” he writes, “is to see the human landscape in detail. There’s a fraternity achieved; we are not alone.”

The absence of daily incident suits him, but when he begins to volunteer at a local care home, he finds himself unexpectedly confronted by the past. The book now spools back in time, first to the 60s when Bob is a young man, and then even earlier, to the 40s, when, as a child, he’s eager to broaden his horizons. These timeshifts, however, are the point at which the novel loses some of its early charm, replacing beautifully observed empathy with hijinks, quirk and eccentricity. But then this is familiar deWitt territory: the Canadian writer’s previous books, among them 2011’s Booker-shortlisted The Sisters Brothers , and 2018’s The French Exit (both made into films), were shot through with the kind of off-kilter humour that Wes Anderson and the Coen Brothers would likely duel over – at dawn, on horseback – to profess the greater admiration for.

Despite being an introverted librarian, 60s Bob manages to fall in love. Connie, a library regular, is keen to escape the religious strictures of her father, and thinks that Bob might just be her route out. Bob even has himself an actual friend, Ethan, a flamboyant womaniser with a quick wit, whose fondness for the quieter man doesn’t mean he respects their marriage vows. Before long, Ethan and Connie have hightailed it off together into the notional sunset, leaving Bob alone.

The 40s section sees Bob as a child, running away from home. On a train, he meets a couple of ageing theatrical performers, two kooky women who decide briefly to take him under their wing, and make him a part of their outdated act. If the novel needed some light relief – debatable – then deWitt provides it here, but it’s ultimately unsatisfying because although it allows its lead character an early taste of adventure, the adventure is quickly curtailed, essentially clipping his wings. Is DeWitt suggesting that this episode is to blame for him reverting to meekness afterwards, to his subsequent failed marriage, and the craving for a quieter life?

“Why do you read rather than live?” Bob is asked at one point. The answer proffered by this sweet, sad and reflective tale suggests it’s because, sometimes, it’s safer to, and that the pleasures to be found within books, vicarious as they are, can occasionally suffice. Not everyone craves the wider canvas.

“It’s a fool who argues with happiness,” deWitt writes at one point, “while the wiser man accepts it as it comes, if it comes at all.”

The Librarianist by Patrick deWitt, published by Bloomsbury, £18.99

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The Librarianist: A Novel

• By Patrick deWitt
• Reviewed by Connor Harrison
• July 11, 2023

A droll, uneven tale about the trials of a bookish loner.

Around midway through The Librarianist , Patrick deWitt’s latest novel, we arrive at the year 1945, a few days before the conclusion of the Second World War. Bob Comet, 11 years old and dissatisfied with home and a mother who doesn’t understand him, has fled on a train and then a bus to the Hotel Elba in Oregon.

It’s on this runaway journey that he meets two elderly traveling actresses, Ida and June. Like many of deWitt’s minor characters, they are eccentric, coasting by on a kind of sharp-edged whimsy. Finding that Bob is following them aboard the bus, June quizzes him on the why and what of his circumstances. He only shrugs:

“Bob shrugged a third time, and here June set her hand upon his shoulder. ‘Bob, the shrug is a useful tool, and seductive in its way; but it is only one arrow in the quiver and we mustn’t overuse it lest we give the false impression of vacancy of the mind, do you see my point?’”

The novel opens much farther in the future. It’s 2005, when Bob, having awoken from another dream of the hotel, is 71 years into a life defined by the art of the shrug. Living alone in “his mint-colored house in Portland” left to him by his mother, he has retired from his career as the local librarian and spends his time “reading, cooking, eating, tidying, and walking.” He is, as deWitt carefully puts it, “not unhappy.”

What quickly becomes clear, however, is that this not-unhappiness comes from decades unruffled by the drama of other people. Instead, Bob lives vicariously through literature, first poring over adventure stories and later graduating to “the dependable literary themes of loss, death, heartbreak, and abject alienation.”

Eventually, of course, as with all introverts and recluses, life outside the page comes knocking. The first knock arrives during one of Bob’s regular miles-long walks. Stopping at a 7-Eleven to buy coffee and a paper, he finds a woman by the name of Chip, who, according to the cashier, has been “standing at the rear of the store facing…the refrigerated beverages” for 45 minutes.

Chip, as the lanyard around her neck explains, is loose from the Gambell-Reed Senior Center, to which Bob returns her. It is at the facility that he begins to volunteer (urged on by some unnamed feeling) and where he is befriended by the head nurse, Maria, and her elderly charges.

The time at Gambell-Reed progresses steadily from the light patter shared between Bob and his new companions to the heart of the novel: Connie Coleman and Ethan Augustine. This narrative leap takes us back to Bob’s early 20s, when he is newly hired at the library and feeling an “uncomplicated love for such things as paper, and pencils, and pencils writing on paper.”

It’s at the library that he meets Connie and Ethan, who become, respectively, his first romantic and fraternal loves. For a brief, sunny period, Bob is not alone. After marrying Connie, with Ethan as their witness, he is adored by both — until Connie and Ethan fall for each other, that is.

That’s no spoiler, as we’re warned early on of the affair, the fallout from which breaks over Bob’s life like a dire illness. Whereas Bob remains a serial shrugger — but devoted to Connie as best he can be — Ethan is both beautiful and instinctive, swaggering into trysts without trying. When Bob first meets him, Ethan is hiding outside the library from a cuckolded husband carrying a handgun; later, a spurned fiancé stabs him with a steak knife. People either want Ethan dead or in bed or both.

This section of The Librarianist , where Bob discovers he’s not even the center of his own love story, is where deWitt’s prose is most impressive. “Here was the very beginning of his realization,” the author writes after the trio concludes a hike that leaves Bob separated from the others, “that there was something dangerous moving in his direction, and that he wouldn’t be allowed to escape it, no matter what clever manuever he might invent or employ.”

The rest of the novel, unfortunately, pales a little in comparison. Bob’s extended memory of the hotel and the cartoonish characters he meets there seems too thin after the saga of Connie and Ethan, and the plot struggles to remain taut. Still, deWitt allows ample room throughout for the turns of phrase and humor he’s best at: witty sentences and concise character descriptions that sparkle like old-fashioned gems.

Above all, The Librarianist succeeds in giving us, in Bob Comet, a literary figure as tragicomic and alien as Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan. “He continued to dream of Hotel Elba,” we’re told of Bob late in the book, “the halls empty but resonant with the sense of someone only just departed.”

Connor Harrison’s writing has appeared in the L.A. Review of Books, Evergreen Review, Action, Spectacle, and Literary Review of Canada. He lives in Montreal.

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Patrick deWitt depicts the loneliness and fullness of an introvert's life

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Through witty dialogue and humour, Patrick deWitt demonstrates both the introvert's brilliance and complexities, emotions and stillness, through the protagonist Bob Comet — a retired librarian in his latest novel,  The Librarianist . 

In The Librarianist , Bob is content spending the rest of his days reading in his Oregon home. But then a chance encounter with an older woman in the supermarket brings him to the senior centre, where he begins volunteering. There, through conversations and reflection that weave back and forth in time, and a few funny characters, Bob's life story is slowly revealed.

Patrick deWitt on what should happen to unfunny people

deWitt is a novelist from Portland, Ore., by way of Vancouver Island. He has written several novels, including The Sisters Brothers ,  Undermajordomo Minor and French Exit .The film adaptation of The Sisters Brothers  premiered at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival starred Joaquin Phoenix, John C. Reilly, Jake Gyllenhaal and Riz Ahmed.  His other books include Undermajordomo Minor and French Exit .

The Librarianist  is on the  CBC Books summer reading list .

• 40 Canadian books to read this summer

deWitt spoke to Ryan B. Patrick about The Librarianist on The Next Chapter .  

The protagonist of this novel is Bob Comet. When I think of his last name Comet, I think motion, speed, impact. But I wouldn't necessarily use those words to describe him. How would you describe Bob and his life right now?

I would agree with you that the name is misleading. I think that he's sort of the opposite. He's fairly stationary, and very much inside himself and he has an active inner life, but it's not represented in his outward appearance. This is somebody who is a career librarian who is an introvert more or less from birth, who has devoted a large portion of his life to reading about people rather than living among them. 

There's some dramatic turns, but generally speaking, he's lived his life through the books he's read, and this is not something that he laments or feels particularly sorrowful about. But at certain points in the book, you see that he is happy for company, or for some society, and the senior centre sort of represents what you call a soft landing for him. It represents a peer group that he didn't know he craved. 

The structure of the book weaves back and forth in time to give us a fuller picture of Bob's life. In fact, we find out early in the story that Bob wasn't always alone. In his 20s,  he was married to Connie. She's more daring than Bob — what does she see in him? 

I think [she] is coming out of a particular situation where she was more or less kept under lock and key by her father and in marrying Bob — this is the late 50s, a way out. But she also recognizes in Bob somebody that she could love and does eventually fall in love with — his modesty, his kindness, his lack of guile or meanness. 

Her father is not an evil man, but he's sort of a demented religious zealot, and Bob represents more or less the opposite of that, a very sort of sane and safe place. She just finds Bob lovable. 

And Bob, more or less, is not considered, being such an introvert, the idea of romantic entanglement, or marriage or any of the traditional trappings of modern romance, but when Connie comes along, he finds himself falling in love with her, and this was something that he hadn't anticipated. And so it's very heavy for both of them. 

There's this through line of love in the story. There's points in his life where he's given love or he finds his people. What do you want to explore about love in this novel? 

You invent these characters and some you care for more than others. I felt a sympathy and a reverence, I suppose, for Bob. You want what's best for these individuals. I wanted him to know love. I knew that it probably wouldn't be something that would last, because it's just not the nature of Bob's story.

And there is a lot of sorrow in Bob's story. But ultimately, I think that he does have  — not just love in terms of receiving it, but I think he feels that he has lots to give, which is, I think, surprising for him.

I wanted him to know what it felt like to be loved and appreciate his receiving it. I just wanted Bob to feel that he was one among many, rather than one sort of on his own. And I believe he gets there at the end. 

As I'm reading this book, I find myself asking what makes a well lived life? What does it mean to you? 

Well, I think there's just a question of, in looking back, did you use your time wisely and did you get to be the person you'd hope to be?

I think for most of us the answer is not quite, you know, and it's just usually sort of skewing somewhat to the negative, but hopefully it's not so far from the original aim as to create a sense of bitterness or anger.

Ideally, a person at the end of his or her life looks back and recognizes that he [or she] did accomplish some of the things he or she set out to do. And that he was one among a group of people who collaborated towards something bigger than himself or herself.  This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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BookBrowse Reviews The Librarianist by Patrick deWitt

Summary  |  Excerpt  |  Reviews  |  Beyond the book  |  Read-Alikes  |  Genres & Themes  |  Author Bio

The Librarianist

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• First Published:
• Jul 4, 2023, 352 pages
• Jun 2024, 256 pages

• Literary Fiction
• Wash. Ore. Idaho
• 20th Century (multiple decades)
• Contemporary
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A moving, quietly funny portrait of one man's life of solitude and literature—a story of love and loss in equal measure, and a tribute to the joy of reading.

Patrick deWitt's The Librarianist begins when Bob Comet, a 71-year-old retired librarian who lives a solitary life in Portland, Oregon, stumbles upon a senior center. "He had no friends, per se; his phone did not ring, and he had no family," deWitt writes, and though Bob isn't unhappy with these circumstances, he's taken with the eccentric group of seniors that he meets, and immediately signs up to volunteer at the center. A lover of literature, he decides to read aloud to the residents; one short story he chooses is Gogol's "The Overcoat," a nod to the type of person one might suspect Bob to be: a tragic everyman, with no life beyond his mundane daily existence. But Bob has faith in the "sideways beauty and harsh humor of the work," as the reader, in turn, learns to have faith in his contentedness and fulfilling inner world. The Librarianist soon takes us back in time to Bob's childhood, when he discovers novels, and then swiftly to his late teens and early 20s, when he becomes a librarian. DeWitt establishes Bob's solitary, slow, bookwormish existence: his mother dies, leaving him alone in the house they used to share; he begins work at a library, whose head librarian keeps the space especially quiet; he's never had a friend or girlfriend. But he finds fulfillment in his routine, his domestic tasks, his work. And soon enough—at 24 years old—he establishes two meaningful and separate relationships: with Ethan, who lives across the street from the library; and with Connie, who patronizes the library with her father. The reader knows what will happen, because Bob has reminisced about it in an early chapter: Connie, his wife, will leave him for Ethan, his best friend. Ethan is charismatic, handsome and rakish; the kind of person Bob describes with the line, "when they enter a room, the room changes." Bob tries to keep Connie away from Ethan, lest he seem so obviously inferior in comparison, but their meeting is inevitable. Connie and Bob are already engaged by that point, but Connie and Ethan just can't help falling in love, with Bob reduced helplessly to a supporting character role. He sits at the dining room table as Connie and Ethan clean and joke together in the kitchen. On the day of the wedding, with Ethan as best man, Connie asks a stranger which guy he thinks is the groom, and they all laugh, horribly, when the stranger points at Ethan. The reader's knowledge of what is to come doesn't lessen the ache of its slow arrival; in fact, it perhaps makes these pages more painful by mirroring Bob's subconscious awareness of the situation. Bob must know, on some level, that his marital respite from solitude is only an aberration—a fluke, he calls it later—and his life will eventually regress back to the mean. Before picking up the plot at the senior center again, deWitt skips back to an episode in 1945; Bob is 11 years old and runs away from home for four days. He stows away on a train, where he meets June and Ida, two traveling thespians who take to him and allow him to accompany them to a hotel on the Oregon coast, where they're scheduled to perform an original show. The two women are eccentric, devoted to each other and their art, utter performers: they speak with an only semi-ironic gravitas, in florid soliloquies and literary metaphors; they talk to him about melancholy and sorrow and regret. The young Bob is captivated and somewhat bewildered; he doesn't say much, but June and Ida seem to appreciate and understand him in a way no one has before, and he does small duties for them, such as walking their dogs and learning to drumroll. Even in the present, Bob still dreams about his days at the hotel, and feels a profound love at the memory, as we have already learned in the novel's first sentences. But eventually the sheriff recognizes him and drives him home; coincidentally, it's May 8, and the drive takes them through an impromptu parade celebrating the end of World War II (see Beyond the Book )—a detail that could represent a sort of homecoming for Bob, back to books and solitude after a brief but necessary sojourn. Which is to say, Bob is not some loveless, angry Houellebecq character; his aloneness doesn't read as a failure to him or to the reader. Quietude and reading are his life, not an escape from it. On their first meeting, Ethan says, "I keep meaning to get to books but life distracts me." "See, for me it's just the opposite," Bob says, pleased with himself. In a slightly different book, I think, Bob—with his disposition as the straight man to strong personalities—could easily have been a writer instead of a reader, and The Librarianist could have read as a Künstlerroman in reverse: his friendship/rivalry with the charismatic Ethan would fuel his work; his otherness and powers of observation would allow him to turn life into words; his fateful four days with June and Ida would set him on a path of creation and beauty and life's marrow-sucking. But instead of taking solace in his ability to turn pain into art, using books to justify his loneliness, Bob turns to literature to recognize himself in others, and to not be alone. His reading is described as "a living thing, always moving, eluding, growing, and he knew it could not end, that it was never meant to end"—a beautiful portrayal that makes this lifetime activity sound closer to the creation of art than what people often call the "consumption" of it. This is not a maudlin novel. DeWitt resists the sentimental; his prose is undramatic and subtly propulsive, and very funny. Bob as a writer-protagonist could also have meant first-person narration—the writer telling their own story—but The Librarianist is in a subtly omniscient third person, with a narrator who gently corrals the reader's sympathies, and who slips infrequently but noticeably into the interiorities of other characters, as if to say: There are other stories here that I could tell, but out of all of them, I'm choosing this one.

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The Fleeting Moment of the Unheroic Individual: An Interview with Patrick deWitt about “The Librarianist”

• An interview with Patrick deWitt about his latest novel, "The Librarianist"

In The Librarianist , the latest novel from Patrick deWitt—author of The Sisters Brothers , French Exit —Bob Comet, a 71-year-old retired librarian, has chosen to spend the majority of his life reading, sequestering himself cozily in the pages of the world’s great literature. In his younger days, after Bob’s best friend Ethan had a marriage-destroying affair with his wife Connie, Bob decided that his best course of action was to sink himself into the secure world of books, of fully stocked, neatly organized stacks, and regularly-renewed library cards; to keep himself largely to himself. Now, in his older age, a chance encounter with a resident from a nearby nursing home compels him to delve into the lives of several of the home’s eccentric inhabitants, revising his life, whether he likes it or not, from the passive voice to the active. Not only that, but Bob is forced to go backwards, into his past, to finally examine how his time with the vaudevillian duo of June and Ida, on the rough road in search of performance venues, led him to experience the kind of life-affirming animation one cannot receive from literature. “Why do you read other than live?” Bob imagines strangers asking him— The Librarianist confronts this rather tricky, existential question on behalf of its protagonist and, by extension, his fellow-reading readers.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Ryan Asmussen

What was the impetus for this story? Was there, at least to some extent, already a Bob Comet, or did the character just arrive?

Patrick deWitt

Bob Comet is an invention, and it took some time before he arrived. In an earlier iteration of the novel, Bob was not the character you meet in The Librarianist , but a much wilder personality, a sort of post-Beat dreamer of unrealistically weird dreams, whose erratic behaviors precipitate his divorce from Connie. This story failed to deliver, or I failed to induce its delivery, but I kept the names and eras and locations and continued to dig and push and slowly, over a period of months, this other story came into focus. 

The structure of the narrative is very fluid in its temporality. Why did you decide upon the way it’s set up now as opposed to, say, a more traditional linear, chronological path?

I could make up something to say in answer to this, pretend I thought it all through and worked out the advantages of an eccentric timeline, but that’s not how my writing mind operates. The truth is that I just set the chapters and eras down in a way that felt commonsensible and pleasing. Obviously I was aware of the non-linear aspect of the story, but my decision not to alter this was less about aesthetics than the sense that the novel was revealing or announcing its form to me. 

The character of Ethan is deeply important not only to the plot but to the character of Bob and his growth. Ethan is essentially a foil to Bob.

Ethan and Bob are opposites, and their friendship exists as a mutual fascination society. Ethan looks up to Bob as a man devoted to the solitary study of literature; Bob is envious of Ethan’s visceral life experience. Bob’s relationship with Ethan ends badly, but the result of this is that Bob burrows more deeply into his own personality than he would have otherwise. Ethan’s legacy, then, beyond the pain he has introduced into Bob’s life, is to bring Bob closer to his true self, which is not so shabby a deal, when you weigh it all out. 

The characters of June and Ida really take on a larger-than-life role in the novel’s final third; they’re very unlike anyone whom we’ve met so far. They could easily have a novel of their own. What was your envisioning of their role in the story, thematically?

Because Bob’s childhood is a lonely and sometimes fraught one, I wanted him to experience comradeship; and in wondering what sort of people might recognize young Bob’s qualities, Ida and June came to mind. I could have gone on and on with that group, it’s true. Actually I did go on and on—I cut quite a lot of that story away in edits. 

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Where do you see this novel fitting in with your previous work? How much of a departure for you might it be?

A book is informed by the circumstances under which it’s written, and The Librarianist was composed during a period of dependable not-happiness; because of this, the text is painted with a sense of melancholy that sets it apart from the rest of my work. Also, it seems to me that I’ve written a comparatively traditional novel—less fanciful, less volatile, perhaps truer or more plain in its emotional sentiments. 

What, above all, is the most lasting idea about or impression of Bob you hope to leave in the reader’s mind? At the close of day, who is this man?

Bob’s story was written as a hat-doff to the interior life, the life of the minor citizen, the small life of modest accomplishment and general stillness. I have no illusions that this novel will change anyone’s point of view; but maybe the occasional reader will recognize something of their experience in Bob, and feel connected or soothed. In the face of the shrill and hateful sound of humanity eating itself, let us remember to praise small stories, the fleeting moment of the unheroic individual. 

FICTION The Librarianist by Patrick deWitt Ecco Press Published on July 4th, 2023

RYAN ASMUSSEN is a writer and educator who works as a Visiting Lecturer in English at the University of Illinois at Chicago and writes for Chicago Review of Books and Kirkus Reviews. A member of the National Book Critics Circle, he has published criticism in Creative Nonfiction, The Review Review, and the film journal Kabinet, journalism in Bostonia and other Boston University publications, and fiction in the Harvard Summer Review. His poetry has been published in The Newport Review, The Broad River Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Compass Rose, and Mandala Journal. Twitter: @RyanAsmussen. Website: www.ryanasmussen.com.

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Book Review: The Librarianist by Patrick DeWitt – a quirky and heartfelt novel with a memorably unmemorable main character

Working in a library, of course I was drawn to this book, with its cover showing an old-fashioned library book date-slip. But what the heck is a librarianist? How did that one slip past me, of all people? I just had to find out.

Bob Comet is the librarianist of the title, an everyman kind of character who has always lived for books. Maybe that’s what librarianist means. He is described as “not unhappy” and seventy-one years of age, a solitary man who fills his days with simple pleasures, such as reading, cooking, and walking.

We catch up with Bob in 2005 when he rescues an elderly woman he bumps into at a 7-Eleven, where he’s gone for coffee. The young cashier doesn’t know what to do with her; she’s been staring at the chilled drinks fridge for getting on for an hour. Bob reads a label attached to her clothing and discovers her name is Chip. He manages to get her home to a care facility and before you know it he’s a volunteer, expanding his world and getting to know the residents.

A coincidence at the care facility occurs that shocks Bob and propels the story back to Bob’s youth. We’re back in the 1940s and 50s when Bob’s love of books begins. You get the impression that it is books that rescue Bob from the reality of the hurly-burly of school, his life at home with a mother that doesn’t understand him, and his general aloneness. He becomes a librarian, and takes on his mother’s house when she dies. You imagine a quiet, solitary, bookish life for Bob, and he does too. And then he meets Connie.

The book describes his relationship with Connie, similarly a person who doesn’t fit in but for quite different reasons. There’s also his sudden friendship with Ethan, who turns up at the library carpark one day, too afraid to go back to his apartment across the road, and the angry policeman inside it. Bob’s life has suddenly a friend and some romance in it – until suddenly it doesn’t.

Why read at all? Why does anyone do it in the first place? Why do I? There is the element of escape, which is real enough—that’s a real-enough comfort. But also we read as a way to come to grips with the randomness of our being alive. To read a book by an observant, sympathetic mind is to see the human landscape in all its odd detail, and the reader says to him or herself, Yes, that’s how it is, only I didn’t know it to describe it. There’s a fraternity achieved, then: we are not alone. Sometimes an author’s voice is familiar to us from the first page, first paragraph, even if the author lived in another country, in another century.” Bob held up his stack of Russians. “How can you account for this familiarity? I do believe that, at our best, there is a link connecting us.

But before we catch up with Bob in 2006 again, where the story left off, there’s an odd chunk of the novel that takes us back to 1945 and an eleven-year-old Bob running away from home. Where he gets to and the people he meets makes for an entertaining enough interlude, full of memorable characters, but I couldn’t help asking myself what it was all about. I couldn’t help wondering why it didn’t seem to have an impact on the Bob we meet later, who returns home eventually, remarkably unchanged. Years later, however, he sometimes wistfully dreams about the seaside hotel that took him in for four days..

The Librarianist might not follow the usual rules for novel plotting in some ways, and the ending is perhaps a little odd, too. But it’s a diverting read, and you can’t help getting to like Bob and the people we meet as seen through his eyes. Patrick DeWitt’s prose is delightful, witty, wry and perceptive, bringing Bob and his times to life.

The novel reminded me a little of some of Anne Tyler’s earlier fiction with its characters that don’t fit in, and the events that pull them out of their lethargy or solitary habits. I’ve always got time for a novel like this, particularly if it’s as nicely written as this one. I’ll pick up another DeWitt novel sometime, I’m sure. The Librarianist is a four-star read from me.

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The Librarianist

Patrick dewitt.

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The morning of the day Bob Comet first came to the Gambell-Reed Senior Center, he awoke in his mint-colored house in Portland, Oregon, in a state of disappointment at the fact of a dream interrupted. He had again been dreaming of the Hotel Elba, a long-gone coastal location he’d visited at eleven years of age in the middle 1940s. Bob was not known for his recall, and it was an ongoing curiosity to him that he could maintain so vivid a sense of place after so many years had passed. More surprising still was the emotion that accompanied the visuals; this dream always flooded his brain with the chemical announcing the onset of profound romantic love, though he’d not known that experience during his time at the hotel. He lay in his bed now, lingering over the feeling of love as it ebbed away from him.

Bob sat up and held his head at a tilt and looked at nothing. He was a retired librarian, seventy-one years of age, and not unhappy. His health was sound and he spent his days reading, cooking, eating, tidying, and walking. The walks were often miles long, and he set out with no destination in mind, choosing his routes improvisationally and according to any potentially promising sound or visual taking place down any potentially promising street. Once he’d witnessed an apartment fire downtown; the hook-and-ladder brigade had saved a baby from an uppermost window and the crowd on the sidewalk had cheered and cried and this was highly exciting for Bob. Another time, in the southeast quadrant, he’d watched a deranged man determinedly ripping out the flower beds in front of a veterinarian’s clinic while dogs looked on from the windows, craning their necks and barking their sense of offense. Most days there was not so much to report or look upon, but it was always good to be in motion, and good to be out among the population, even if he only rarely interacted with any one person. He had no friends, per se; his phone did not ring, and he had no family, and if there was a knock on the door it was a solicitor; but this absence didn’t bother him, and he felt no craving for company. Bob had long given up on the notion of knowing anyone, or of being known. He communicated with the world partly by walking through it, but mainly by reading about it. Bob had read novels exclusively and dedicatedly from childhood and through to the present.

On this day, Bob was fed and out the door before nine o’clock in the morning. He had dressed according to the weatherman’s prediction but the weatherman was off, and so Bob had gone into the world unprepared for the cold and wet. He enjoyed being outdoors in poor weather but only if he was properly outfitted; in particular he disliked having cold hands, which he did have now, and so he entered a 7-Eleven, pouring himself a cup of coffee and lingering by the newspaper rack, warming himself while gleaning what news he could by the headlines. The cashier was a boy of twenty, friendly but distracted by a woman standing at the rear of the store facing a bank of glass doors which gave way to the refrigerated beverages. She wore a matching pink sweat suit, bright white sneakers, a mesh-back baseball hat, and a pair of dark sunglasses, and she was standing still as statuary. It was the outfit of a toddler or a teenager, but the woman had a shock of frizzy white hair coming out from under the cap, and must have been in her sixties or seventies. The cashier appeared concerned, and Bob asked in a whisper, “Everything all right?”

“I don’t think it is,” the cashier whispered back. “I mean, she doesn’t seem to be on anything, and her clothes are clean. But she’s been watching the energy drinks for forty-five minutes, and I’m worried she’s going to freak out.”

“Have you tried talking to her?”

“I asked if I could help her find something. No response.”

“Want me to go check in with her?”

“What if she freaks out?”

“What do you mean by ‘freaks out’?”

“It’s things I can’t even talk about in polite conversation. And the cops won’t come unless there’s a weapon involved. You know how many ways there are to freak out without a weapon? Literally one million ways.”

All the time they were speaking they were watching the woman. Bob said, “I’m going to go check in with her.”

“Okay, but if she starts freaking out, can you try to get her through the doors?” The cashier made a corralling gesture, arms out. “Once she’s in the parking lot she’s out of my domain.”

Bob moved toward the figure in pink, humming benignly, both to announce his arrival and identify himself as a friend. “Oh, hello,” he said, as if he just noticed her standing there. She didn’t respond in any measurable way, her features hidden behind the cap and hair and sunglasses. “Is everything all right today, ma’am? Anything I can help you with?” Still no reaction, and Bob looked to the cashier, who touched his own shoulder in a gesture communicating his belief that Bob should give the woman a shake. Bob didn’t shake her but rested his hand on her shoulder; the instant he made contact she became activated, like a robot coming to life, turning away from Bob and walking deliberately down the aisle and right out of the store. Bob watched her go. “What should I do now?” he asked the cashier.

“I don’t know!” the cashier said. He was happy the woman was gone but also happy that something interesting had happened.

Bob said, “I’m going to follow her,” and he left the store.

He walked behind the woman at a distance of ten paces, sipping his coffee, marking her meager progress. It took her full five minutes to travel one city block, at which point she became frozen again, this time at a bus stop, standing outside the glass shelter and looking in at the empty bench. It began to rain and the woman’s sweat suit grew damp. When she started to shiver, Bob approached and draped his coat over her shoulders. But soon he was shivering and damp; when a police car pulled up at a red light, Bob waved to the policeman to get his attention. The policeman waved back, then drove away.

Bob moved to stand under the shelter of the bus stop, facing the woman. His coffee had gone cold in his hand and it occurred to him he hadn’t paid for it. He’d decided his walk had been ruined and that he would cut his losses, forfeit the coat, and taxi home, when he noticed a laminated card hanging from a string around the woman’s neck. He stepped around the shelter and, tilting her body slightly, made to inspect the card. There was a photograph of the woman, in sunglasses and cap, and beneath the photo, a text: My name is CHIP, and I live at the GAMBELL-REED SENIOR CENTER . Beneath the text there was an address, and beneath the address was the image of an imposing Craftsman home with medieval touches—a tower and weathervane, a wraparound porch. Bob recognized the house from his walks, and he said, “I know this place. Is this where you live? Is your name Chip?” A determination rose up in him, and he decided he would deliver Chip to the address.

He took her gently by the arm, pointing her in the direction of the center. Every ten or fifteen steps she paused and groaned, but her resistance was minor, and they made their plodding advancement against the weather. She wanted to go into every storefront they passed, and so Bob had to repeatedly correct her path; each time he did this she became tense and made further groaning noises. “Sorry, Chip,” he told her. “I wish we could stop and browse but they’ll be worrying about you, and we don’t want them to worry, do we? No, let’s keep on, we’re almost there.”

Soon the Gambell-Reed Senior Center was in sight. Bob had walked past the property any number of times, often asking himself what it was, exactly. It stood perched on a hill, looming over its neighbors on both sides and looking very much like the cliched image of a haunted house. There was no signage announcing its function, but hospital shuttle buses and ambulances were commonly parked at the curb, and a wheelchair access path zigzagged up from the sidewalk and to the entrance. Bob led Chip up this path, studying the center as they made their ascent. It looked, he realized, quite a lot like the Hotel Elba; and while Bob took no stock in the unearthly, he couldn’t help but wonder at the similarity between the properties, in connection with his dream of the same morning.

The front door was an imposing barrier of green-painted metals and bulletproof glass, and it was locked. Bob buzzed a doorbell-buzzer and the door buzzed back, unlocked itself with a clack, and swung slowly open. Chip walked in under her own steam, disappearing around a corner while Bob stood by, waiting for someone to come meet him at the threshold; but there was no one, and after a long, ponderous pause, the door began evenly closing. He was about to turn and go when a bellowing male voice from behind hailed him: “Hold that door!” The voice beheld so pure a conviction that Bob reacted without thinking, blocking the sweep with his right foot, which consequently was smashed by such a force of violence that his pain was only barely concealable. The door bounced back and again was swinging open. Meanwhile, the voice’s owner, an abnormally large, that is, tall, broad, wide man in an abnormally large electronic wheelchair, was bearing down on Bob at a high rate of speed and with a look of steely certitude in his bloodshot eyes. As he whizzed past Bob and into the center he pinched the brim of an abnormally large beret in a salute of thanks. The same instant this man entered, there came a call from unseen voices, a calamitous, jeering greeting, a joyful commencement of an earlier communication, as though some new evidence gathered overnight had altered a prior dispute. “Pup pup pup,” the man said, wagging his mitt of a hand to downplay the noise. He drove his chair deeper into the center proper.

A forty-something-year-old woman in pale green scrubs and a beige cardigan was walking up to meet Bob. She asked if there was anything she could help him with and Bob explained about his bringing Chip back. The woman nodded that she understood, but she wasn’t noticeably impressed that Chip had been at large, or that she had been safely reinstalled. She introduced herself as Maria and Bob said he was Bob. When the door began closing, Maria stepped back, hand held aloft in a gesture of neutral farewell; but here Bob both surprised himself and Maria by hop-limping into the center, and afterward stood lightly panting, while Maria considered whether to call for security.

__________________________________

From  The Librarianist  by Patrick deWitt. Copyright © 2023 by Patrick deWitt. Excerpted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

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Word of Mouth

Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, the librarianist.

After 50 years of working at the same branch library in Portland, Oregon, Bob Comet --- now in his early 70s --- is struggling a bit with retirement. He tends to walk aimlessly through the city for miles every day, interacting with few people but observing them: “He communicated with the world partly by walking through it, but mainly by reading about it.”

Bob’s status as an observer is put to the test when, on one of his rambles, he encounters an elderly woman in a seemingly catatonic state in front of the cooler at 7-Eleven. He helps lead her back to the senior center where (according to her badge) she lives, and there he finds himself reluctantly drawn to the residents and visitors at the small facility. His early efforts at volunteering go somewhat awry, but he establishes relationships with them regardless --- relationships that lead readers into episodes from his past that help explain the man he’s become.

"THE LIBRARIANIST is quietly wrenching and broadly funny by turns. In the end, though, it’s most notable as a lifelong character study of an overtly unremarkable man who nevertheless has seen his share of drama."

Two of these episodes could stand on their own as short stories. One particularly Twain-esque saga involves an 11-year-old Bob, who is running away for four days to the dilapidated Hotel Elba, where he finds himself drawn into the orbit of two charismatic and cantankerous thespians preparing to put on a show. This brief adventure clearly makes a mark on his psyche, as the whole novel opens with him waking up from a recurring dream recounting his time at the hotel. The significance of this vignette is not entirely apparent until the very end of the book, so some readers may find themselves growing impatient with his misadventures here, if they’re not immediately charmed by the winsome cast of characters he encounters.

The more emotionally affecting flashback is to Bob’s young adulthood. As a newly minted librarian, he has a new best friend, Ethan, and a love interest, Connie, at the same time. Inexperienced with relationships like these, and convinced that neither the vivacious Connie nor the louche Ethan could really like a staid person such as himself for any length of time, he does not want them to meet one another. But of course they do, and Bob’s worst fears play out in understated yet heartbreaking ways, the repercussions of which persist for decades.

Given the title and even its jacket art, readers might (incorrectly) assume that THE LIBRARIANIST participates in a genre of novels about lonely, bookish people belatedly finding love, redemption or community. Those who have read Patrick deWitt’s previous books probably would harbor no such delusions; though not satirical like some of his prior work, it’s also decidedly unsentimental. Bob’s evolution as a character is not dramatic or particularly inspiring. But it's subtly satisfying, and its oddly moving final scene --- set during an awkward Halloween encounter between elementary school children and the center’s senior citizens --- finds Bob coming into his own.

THE LIBRARIANIST is quietly wrenching and broadly funny by turns. In the end, though, it’s most notable as a lifelong character study of an overtly unremarkable man who nevertheless has seen his share of drama.

Reviewed by Norah Piehl on July 15, 2023

The Librarianist by Patrick deWitt

• Publication Date: July 2, 2024
• Genres: Fiction
• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Ecco
• ISBN-10: 0063085135
• ISBN-13: 9780063085138