The Librarianist by Patrick deWitt: A compelling storyteller but an uncompelling protagonist

The Librarianist

Author: Patrick deWitt

ISBN-13: 978-1526646897

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Guideline Price: £18.99

The protagonist of Patrick deWitt’s new novel is an unassuming introvert with a deceptively dynamic-sounding name. We meet retired librarian Bob Comet in 2005 as a 71-year-old: “He had no friends, per se; his phone did not ring, and he had no family ... but this absence didn’t bother him and he felt no craving for company.” He volunteers at an old people’s home, where he is instructed to “circulate” among the residents as they pass their days watching TV and playing puzzles. When Bob learns that one dementia-addled inmate is none other than his ex-wife, Connie, whom he had divorced some 45 years earlier, the narrative skips back to the 1950s: we revisit the early years of Bob’s career at a municipal library, and his doomed entanglement with Connie. In a third narrative segment, set during his childhood in the 1940s, Bob runs away from home and meets two eccentric actresses who take him under their wing.

We quickly learn that Connie eloped with Bob’s best friend, Ethan, a Casanova whose conspicuous track record of seducing other men’s partner’s didn’t deter Bob from placing his trust in him. Bob’s cuckolding is poignantly rendered, playing out with a certain grim inevitability while he watches on despondently, aware that something’s not right but powerless to stop it. Over the course of the deception, Connie’s guilt manifests in a perverse, condescending solicitude: she “performed a caretakerish doting over his person, as though he were suffering under some nonfatal yet unenviable impairment.” Bob accepts his fate with surprisingly little rancour, musing instead on the yin and yang of friendships in general: “What did Ethan see in Bob, then? Was Bob exotic in his plainness?”

Unfortunately, Bob is similarly anonymous on the page. His innocent unworldliness and extreme passivity make him an atypical protagonist, but also a somewhat underwhelming one

Indeed, Bob is defined not so much by his needs and desires as by the absence thereof: “It was Bob’s lack of vanity and his natural enjoyment of modest accomplishment that gave him the satisfaction to see him through the decades of his lifetime.” His work was his principal source of joy: “He felt uncomplicated love for such things as paper, and pencils, and pencils writing on paper ... Bob was certain that a room filled with printed matter was a room that needed nothing.” We are told that “from an early age he had a gift for invisibility; he was not tormented by his peers because his peers did not see him, his schoolteachers prone to forgetting and reforgetting his name”. Unfortunately, Bob is similarly anonymous on the page. His innocent unworldliness and extreme passivity make him an atypical protagonist, but also a somewhat underwhelming one.

It’s a shame, because deWitt is a genial and engaging storyteller. We meet some entertainingly cranky characters, including Connie’s boorish and paranoid father, and the imperious Miss Ogilvie, a head librarian who has no interest whatsoever in books but is very enthusiastic about enforcing silence. The highlight of Ethan’s philandering repertoire is an affair with his fiancee’s mother, which he recounts with amusing blitheness: “There was a lot of running around and ducking into closets ... Each woman wore a strong perfume but not the same brand; I’ve never taken so many showers in my life.” Bob’s brief stint in the theatre world – during which he learns to play the drums and is paid to hand out flyers – is the most fun part of the book. His adoptive guardians, Ida and June, are good company as they expound in mannered tones on weighty questions such as the difference between melancholy and sorrow. The dialogue in this section is spry and droll; we get the distinct sense that the author enjoyed writing it.

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It has something of the sensibility of children’s fiction: the young naif, befuddled by the ways of the world and running away to, as it were, join the circus

The Librarianist has a throwback quality in everything from its third-person narration to deWitt’s quaint turns of phrase and homely sitcom humour. It has something of the sensibility of children’s fiction: the young naif, befuddled by the ways of the world and running away to, as it were, join the circus. Even in his elderly iteration, he retains a certain child-like, uncomplicated goodness. Early in the novel, we read that “Bob sometimes had the sense there was a well inside him, a long, bricked column of cold air with still water at the bottom”. This image, tellingly evocative of hollowness and inertia, rather sums up the book. The Librarianist is tidily crafted and pleasantly life-affirming in the way twee novels can sometimes be, but the grown-up reader might very well find themselves – like Connie all those years ago – wanting more.