Assessment: Patrick de Witt’s new novel ‘The Librarianist’

Summarize this content material to 540 phrases Canadian expat novelist Patrick deWitt wears naturalism like a sort of ill-fitting dinner jacket. His most well-liked mode is what Katy Waldman of the New Yorker known as “stealth absurdism,” flitting amongst genres — the neo-Western in “The Sisters Brothers”; the fairy story in “Undermajordomo Minor”; the comedy of manners in “French Exit” — whereas peopling his work with eccentrics and oddballs.All of which makes “The Librarianist,” at the very least in its early phases, one thing of a departure. 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.” His dream includes a formative expertise within the Forties when, as a precocious 11-year-old, he ran away from dwelling and located himself on the Lodge Elba, “a long-gone coastal location” he nonetheless remembers vividly.Within the narrative current, which takes place within the pre-pandemic, pre-recession years between 2005 and 2006, Bob lives alone in a mint-green home and spends a lot of his time in isolation together with his beloved books. A studious baby, Bob turned a librarian partly as a result of he feels extra consolation within the imagined world of novels than in the true world that surrounds him. When he encounters a girl struggling dementia in a 7-Eleven retailer and returns her to her dwelling, an area retirement residence known as the Gambell-Reed Senior Middle, he decides on a whim to volunteer his time studying to the occupants, one thing they react to with boredom verging on disdain.As Bob pursues his late-life need to minister to the previous people in Gambell-Reed, he additionally remembers his two formative grownup relationships, together with his ex-wife, Connie, and his greatest buddy, Ethan, a fast-talking playboy who finally ends up stealing Connie away from him. The flashback part involving Bob’s budding romance with Connie accommodates glints of the sort of eccentric determine deWitt appears so enamoured of: Connie’s father is a spiritual fanatic who clothes them each in hooded black capes for his or her journeys to the library the place Connie and Bob first meet. It’s right here, additionally, that he meets Ethan, hiding out from a jealous husband whose spouse he’s sleeping with.There are earlier indications of deWitt’s “stealth absurdism” within the character of Miss Ogilvie, Bob’s first boss on the library. A vicious harridan who prizes nothing a lot as silence, Miss Ogilvie is a comic book delight, a personality on the margins of the story who absolutely inhabits each scene she seems in. Regardless of her highly effective presence, nonetheless, neither she nor Connie’s father — nor, for that matter, the bombastic Ethan — absolutely detract from the concentrate on Bob and his bookish interiority, which carries “The Librarianist” ahead in a spirit of what could be known as insouciant melancholy.Till, that’s, a piece two-thirds of the way in which by the novel that dramatizes the 11-year-old Bob operating away from dwelling to the Lodge Elba, the place he falls in with Jane and Ida, a pair of histrionic actors making ready to placed on a efficiency that appears ill-fated from the beginning. Right here deWitt dispenses with any pretence of subversion and lets his absurdist flag fly, to the novel’s detriment.Previous to the prolonged flashback to 1945, deWitt has been completely proficient in portray a portrait of a lonely man who by no means appeared suited to life on the earth. Deserted by the one lady he ever liked, Bob has change into a portrait in loneliness and creeping previous age. Certainly, the one vital second in all the Lodge Elba part — which incorporates the recipe for “frizzled beef” at an area eatery and a pair of canine dressed as witches — includes Jane’s distinction between melancholy and sorrow. “Melancholy is the wistful identification of time as thief,” she tells younger Bob. “Sorrow is the understanding you shall not get that which you crave.”Each are relevant to Bob, a personality who embodies an unstated disappointment that infuses nearly all of the novel. DeWitt’s nice achievement is in creating, maybe for the primary time, a personality whose very ordinariness is his defining characteristic. In fact, the part on the Lodge Elba goes to indicate the extent to which an unusual life might be misleading, although this comes at a price on the extent of emotional resonance. The aching coronary heart of “The Librarianist” is a piercing seriocomic character examine of isolation and abandonment. Would that deWitt had left his extra flamboyant tendencies within the drawer for this one.Steven W. Beattie is a author in Stratford, OntarioSHARE:JOIN THE CONVERSATION Anybody can learn Conversations, however to contribute, try to be a registered Torstar account holder. If you don’t but have a Torstar account, you’ll be able to create one now (it’s free)Signal InRegisterConversations are opinions of our readers and are topic to the Code of Conduct. The Star
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