The Librarianist

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Abandoned by the one woman he ever loved, Bob has become a portrait in loneliness and creeping old age.

But she’s been watching the energy drinks for forty-five minutes, and I’m worried she’s going to freak out. A book where nothing really happens, but it's more of a character study of an introvert and their solitary life. The late, great Anita Brookner pulled off the harrowing drama of ordinary life in one perfect novel after another. 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. I think each Patrick deWitt novel is going to be the one that helps everyone fall in love with his writing, but The Librarianist could finally do it .By contrast we get very little information on the books that Bob reads – which means that for us our true impression is that Bob lives rather then reads. From bestselling and award-winning author Patrick deWitt comes the story of Bob Comet, a man who has lived his life through and for literature, unaware that his own experience is a poignant and affecting narrative in itself. 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. 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. If I had a disappointment it is that the book does not quite live up to what really first attracted me to the book and what I had hoped for from the early chapters (and some early reviews) as really capturing the life of someone who really (to take a quote from the end of the novel) believes that “the real world was the world of books [novels]: it was here that mankind’s finest inclinations were represented” ­to the extent that he prefers to engage with the world through that medium.

DeWitt’s expertise at creating eccentric characters is on full display after Bob gets a job at the library working for a woman who hates children and insists on complete silence. Bob Comet is a retired librarian, isolated but not lonely, living out his quiet days in a mint-colored house in Oregon, surrounded by his books and small comforts.The plot managed to get back to the senior center near the end where Bob became a resident himself eventually. The title character, Bob Comet, is a former librarian in deWitt’s hometown of Portland, Oregon, whom we first encounter waking “in a state of disappointment from a dream interrupted. 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. But the energy picks up considerably — and just in time — in the novel’s second section, which jumps back half a century .