Bob Comet, the unassuming hero of Patrick deWitt’s sweet, beguiling novel The Librarianist, is a 71-year-old retiree living in Portland, Oregon. The title is a deWitt word, reflecting Bob’s extreme immersion in that most honourable of professions, librarian.
For 45 years, Bob’s unambitious career offered two things: a deep sense of fulfilment and a haven from the world, which he preferred to experience through reading.
In retirement, he has no friends or family. He sincerely believes he is “not unhappy”, but that notion is about to be challenged.
DeWitt introduces us to Bob early one morning in 2005, when he awakes from a recurring dream about a gothic-style hotel he visited as a child. As always, the vividness of the dream jolts him; even more, “the feeling of deep love” it evokes.
Bob sticks to a routine, mainly reading, cooking and maintaining the house inherited from his mother. Most days, he also goes for a long walk, meandering around the neighbourhood as a detached observer.
Today is going to be different. It’s freezing, so he pops into a 7-Eleven for a coffee and spots an elderly woman wearing a pink sweat suit and sunglasses, staring mutely at a wall of drink cabinets. She’s been there for 45 minutes, whispers the worried cashier.
Unusually, Bob decides to intercede, and takes her “home”, information he obtains by reading the laminated card hanging around her neck: “My name is CHIP, and I live at the Gambell-Reed Senior Centre.”
The centre, which reminds him of the hotel of his dreams, is populated by five residents, including Chip, and about a dozen daycare regulars. The ambience is grumpy boredom, ailments and dementia.
Welcomed by weary carer Maria, Bob decides to offer his literary services as a volunteer and prepares studiously for his big debut: reading The Black Cat, an unpleasant story by Edgar Allan Poe, to his audience, who all walk out.
Well, thinks Bob, maybe they’d prefer a “syllabus” of the Russian greats, like The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol, but it’s another instant flop. He goes home in a sulk, but Maria asks him to return as himself: no props, no books. “You’re the steady, hand-on-the-tiller type, and I think your presence might be useful.”
So Bob makes a new start, and he’s good. So is deWitt, a marvellously inventive (and, yes, witty) Canadian-American writer who – like Bob – lives in Portland. Described as “the great chronicler of American weirdos”, one of his best-known works is The Sisters Brothers, a wild western about two assassins that was shortlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize.
This is his fifth novel. There is nothing flashy about Bob Comet, yet he may be deWitt’s most humane character yet. As a quiet, decent man who has shuttered his emotions, Bob finds his work at the centre starts to shift something inside him. One day, to his surprise, he realises, “he felt happy”.
Moments like these are very affecting, but this is not a saccharine tale. Linus, a brusque resident of “high, true ugliness”, becomes an unexpected friend. Linus shows Bob a photo of a gorgeous young man (himself) and laments that “one day I was Paul Newman” and “mated” promiscuously until, suddenly, it all vanished, much to the delight of his many enemies.
Embarrassed by Linus’s crude tales, Bob shyly reveals he’s had only one love, his ex-wife Connie, who left him.
This confession releases a private floodgate of emotions, leading to the next part of the book, including “the perfect cruelty” of his marriage. The details of its collapse, which Bob, at the time, could see coming, is written with an awful, pulsing tension that swept over him like “the texture of a nightmare”. He never recovered.
It’s a relief to pause and meet young Bob in the next section, set in 1945. Aged 11, he’s a solitary child, a big reader, embarrassed by his mother. So he runs away from home, his first and only big adventure.
This short episode takes on a slightly garish Wes Anderson-type hue, as the boy jumps on a train, hiding in a first-class cabin later boarded by two peculiar elderly ladies with two dogs and a mountain of luggage. June and Ida are two “broke thespians” heading for a season in a hotel on the coast. To his joy, they invite Bob to join them, and for four days he becomes part of this fairytale place with a tower, sloping floors, a one-armed manager and a feeling that he belongs. It enters his dreams for the rest of his life.
The Librarianist is the story of a small life told simply, with great warmth. So, by the time deWitt eases us into the brief final stretch, a year after Bob’s first visit to the centre, I feared for him. But Bob manages to get the last laugh, surprising himself – and the reader, too.
The Librarianist, by Patrick deWitt (Bloomsbury, $37)
