The Librarianist

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There isn’t really a story, just a bunch of things that happen to the main character across certain points in his life that don’t add up to anything. Bob Comet is our main character. He’s a retired librarian who decides to help out at the local old folks’ home, curating a selection of his favourite stories to read to the residents - and then he finds out one of the residents’ identities, which holds great importance to him.

This is his fifth and latest novel – and the only other I have read – and it retains something of the same offbeat humour and eccentric cast list (even including a Sheriff), but is a far more introspective novel and in fact is even blurbed as “a wide-ranging and ambitious document of the introvert’s condition”. Weird and hilariously deadpan in just the way you’d expect from the author of The Sisters Brothers and French Exit, this was the pop of fun my summer needed. 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.DeWitt does this, he has a simple story, a life, to some it might be quite a mediocre life, but it isn't. He examines that life and highlights and weaves and sees and while he is seeing he shows us because that is what we want with stories, we want to see, to understand, to connect and while connecting we feel seen too and that is the ultimate goal. We are seen, we exist. What makes a good story, the elements within or the teller? I lean more towards the teller. A good teller is able to bring the simplest story to life, is able to turn it around and examine its elements going deep and deeper if he wants, showing what makes up the whole, the nuances, the consequences. 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.

Behind Bob Comet’s straight-man façade is the story of an unhappy child’s runaway adventure during the last days of the Second World War, of true love won and stolen away, of the purpose and pride found in the librarian’s vocation, and of the pleasures of a life lived to the side of the masses. Bob’s experiences are imbued with melancholy but also a bright, sustained comedy; he has a talent for locating bizarre and outsized players to welcome onto the stage of his life. Bob Comet is the non-humorous Leslie Jordan of a Wes Anderson film, and I was determined to give this book five stars based on the first half of the book alone. Sadly, the third part of the story saw my enthusiasm falter, and the last part ended with my expectations battling the reality of life and fiction.

Reviews

The Telegraph values your comments but kindly requests all posts are on topic, constructive and respectful. Please review our A for the most part enjoyable read, somewhat different story than I'd expected, but enjoyable nonetheless. All his life he had believed the real world was the world of books; it was here that mankind’s finest inclinations were represented.” 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. Bob Comet, a retired librarian ... 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. A quietly effective and moving character study.

To me, this book suffered from a lengthy section about Bob's one rebellion in his childhood, where he ran away from home for four days when he was 11, and got involved with a strange but well meaning group of people in another town. Again, the dialogue was the high point, but the whole episode, while making a great short story, seemed to have no bearing on the rest of the book. 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?

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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. That international success set expectations high, but deWitt, who seems as unflappable as his deadpan assassins, has shown no signs of feeling boxed in. His next novel, “Undermajordomo Minor,” was a gothic adventure, and then, in another course change, came a brittle comedy of manners called “French Exit.” How a nice quiet librarianist, who starts off helping a person, and then volunteers, and then becomes a part of something greater than himself, can actually be a sweet yet flawed imperfect, but readable story.

Bob Comet, deWitt’s sepia-toned hero, is 71 years old, healthy, tidy and “not unhappy.” Since retiring from the public library where he spent his entire professional career, he’s enjoyed a life of almost uninterrupted solitude in the house his mother left to him decades earlier. “He had no friends, per se,” deWitt writes. “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.” Between young Bob’s passive-sounding “Okay” (or silent shrugging) whenever anyone is speaking to him and his lifelong acceptance of happiness when it came (but reluctance to actively seek happiness or too keenly despair its loss), this seems less like “sadness” to me than a persistent character trait: Bob was made this way, and he doesn’t suffer for it. In what I thought was a really perceptive observation, deWitt writes that as an old man, sometimes Bob dreams of his days at the hotel and wakes with a vague feeling of having fallen in love (although those days were not romantic), and that feels like a really true description of nostalgia to me; and especially nostalgia for the most foundational experiences of what made us who we are (I'm sure there's a German word for that experience). 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.”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.” Behind Bob Comet's straight man facade is the story of an unhappy child's runaway adventure during the last days of the Second World War, of true love won and stolen away, of the purpose and pride found in the librarian's vocation, and the pleasures of a life lived to the side of the masses. Comet's experiences are imbued with melancholy but also a bright, sustained comedy; he has a talent for locating bizarre and outsized players to welcome onto the stage of his life. 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.” When Bob is first introduced to the senior center, that section is too long, and there are too many characters.