“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.”
I’ve read many reviews of The Librarianist that say: If you’ve liked Patrick deWitt before, you’ll like this, too. And as I have read, and enjoyed, every novel deWitt has written so far, I expected to like this one as well; and I did. So this is either more of the samey-sameness that satisfied my set expectations, or it is objectively good — and I would argue for the latter. Centred on retired librarian Bob Comet, deWitt surrounds our reclusive protagonist with outlandish characters who speak in funny, offbeat conversations, and while that is all highly entertaining, as we scroll back through Bob’s history to his young adulthood and further to an adventurous episode from a lonely childhood, deWitt makes some very perceptive observations about what makes a person; what makes a life. I’ve also seen many reviews that call this too sad or plotless and I would argue against that as well: Bob is more an introvert than truly melancholy — taking joy where he can find it, but never really seeking it outside of books over his many years — and it all adds up to a plot that is recognisable as a real, human life. I loved every bit of this and will read anything deWitt comes out with in the future. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
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.
In the “present” of 2006, seventy-one year old Bob Comet lives alone in a mint green bungalow, inherited from his long-deceased single mother, on a nondescript cul-de-sac in Portland, Oregon. While out for his daily walk one day, he discovers a catatonic old woman at the convenience store, and when he returns her to her seniors residence, he is so intrigued by the home’s weird assemblage of residents that he decides to volunteer there. Through interactions with these residents, we learn more about Bob’s personal history; and after a shocking revelation, the story rewinds to Bob’s early adulthood, and then to an episode in which he ran away from home at eleven, before returning to the present.
I enjoyed each of these sections, but was most intrigued by the stories of his brief marriage and his running away; and mostly because of the characters and their deWittian conversations (between his eccentric wife and their friends; between the oddballs Bob met, and who took him in, at a dilapidated hotel near the end of WWII). This is excerpted from a conversation between two old vaudevillian performers who discover the runaway Bob in their private train compartment:
“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.”
And the following, spoken by the proprietor of the rundown hotel, would seem to be the life advice that young Bob most took to heart:
“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.”
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).
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.
When The Librarianist returns to the present, Bob is making connections with the folks at the seniors residence. He finds some unexpected answers to the small mysteries of his life, and although I would argue that he hadn’t been exactly unhappy during his decades of solitariness, he discovers a more connected way of living; and he finds that he likes it. From the entertaining sentences to the satisfying story arc, this was exactly what I expect from deWitt: and I loved it.
