Review: Patrick de Witt’s New Novel ‘The Librarianist’
Canadian expatriate novelist Patrick deWitt wears naturalism as a kind of ill-fitting tuxedo jacket. His mode of choice is what the New Yorker’s Katy Waldman called “stealth absurdism,” fluttering between genres—the neo-Western in “The Sisters Brothers”; the fairy tale in “Undermajordomo Minor”; the comedy of manners in “French Exit” – as he populates his work with eccentrics and eccentrics.
All of this makes “The Librarianist,” at least in the early stages, something of a departure. The title character, Bob Comet, is a former librarian in deWitt’s hometown of Portland, Oregon, whom we first encounter when he wakes up “in a state of disappointment from an interrupted dream.” His dream is about a formative experience in the 1940s, when he ran away from home as a precocious 11-year-old and ended up in Hotel Elba, “a long-gone coastal town,” he vividly recalls.
In the narrative present, set in the years before the pandemic, before the recession between 2005 and 2006, Bob lives alone in a mint green house and spends much of his time in seclusion with his beloved books. A studious child, Bob became a librarian, in part because he is more comfortable in the imagined world of novels than in the real world around him. When he encounters a woman with dementia at a 7-Eleven store and brings her back to her home, a local retirement home called the Gambell-Reed Senior Center, he decides on a whim to volunteer his time reading to the residents, something she respond to. with boredom verging on contempt.
As Bob pursues his desire to serve the old people in Gambell-Reed, he also remembers his two formative adult relationships, with his ex-wife, Connie, and his best friend, Ethan, a fast-talking playboy who ends up making Connie van steal him away. The flashback section on Bob’s burgeoning romance with Connie contains glimpses of the kind of eccentric figure DeWitt seems so enamored with: Connie’s father is a religious zealot who dresses them both in hooded black capes for their trips to the library where Connie and Bob meeting for the first time. Here he also meets Ethan, who is hiding from a jealous husband whose wife he is sleeping with.
There are earlier indications of DeWitt’s “stealth absurdism” in the character of Miss Ogilvie, Bob’s first boss at the library. Miss Ogilvie, a villainous recluse who values nothing more than silence, is a comedic delight, a character in the margins of the story who fully inhabits every scene in which she appears. for that matter, the bombastic Ethan – completely detracts from the focus on Bob and his bookish inwardness, which “The Librarianist” brings out in a spirit of what might be called indifferent melancholy.
Until, that is, a section two-thirds into the novel that dramatizes 11-year-old Bob running away from home to the Hotel Elba, where he fills in with Jane and Ida, a pair of theatrical actors preparing to put on a performance that will be from the beginning seems fateful. Here, DeWitt dispenses with any semblance of subversion and lets his absurdist banner fly, to the detriment of the novel.
Prior to the extended flashback to 1945, DeWitt was absolutely adept at painting a portrait of a lonely man who never seemed fit for life in the world. Abandoned by the only woman he ever loved, Bob has become a portrait of loneliness and creeping old age. Indeed, the only significant moment in the entire Hotel Elba section – featuring the recipe for “frizzled beef” at a local eatery and a few dogs dressed as witches – involves Jane’s distinction between melancholy and sadness. “Melancholy is the wistful identification of time as a thief,” she tells young Bob. “Grief is the realization that you won’t get what you crave.”
Both apply to Bob, a character who embodies an unspoken sadness that permeates most of the novel. DeWitt’s great achievement is to create, perhaps for the first time, a character whose commonplaceness is his defining characteristic. Of course, the section in Hotel Elba shows the extent to which an ordinary life can be deceptive, albeit at the expense of emotional resonance. The aching heart of “The Librarianist” is a penetrating seriocomic character study of isolation and abandonment. If only DeWitt had left his more flamboyant tendencies in the drawer for this one.
