The Librarianist

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Beneath the text there was an address, and beneath the address was the image of an imposing Craftsman home with medieval touches—a tower and weathervane, a wraparound porch. I found this part of the book quite slow especially the part when Bob ran away when he was a young boy. He makes friends with some of the other residents, and reads to them from some of his favourite books, even though they are mostly disinterested. The late, great Anita Brookner pulled off the harrowing drama of ordinary life in one perfect novel after another. Because it’s a fool who argues with happiness, while the wiser man accepts it as it comes, if it comes at all.

Given the placid surface of our own existence, an author’s faux plainness grates like a Hollywood actor putting on an accent from our hometown. But, alas, despite deWitt’s claim, the Bob we discover in these pages does not appear to have read any particular novels, just many of them, the way Sarah Palin reads lots of newspapers.

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. It has interesting, unusual, quirky, and likable characters, a childhood adventure, many laugh out loud moments, and a surprise. It is a priority for CBC to create products that are accessible to all in Canada including people with visual, hearing, motor and cognitive challenges. She didn’t respond in any measurable way, her features hidden behind the cap and hair and sunglasses. We all want to, and we are every one of us disappointed, and we shall die not knowing it,” June sighed.

Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior.She believed Bob was reading beyond the accepted level of personal pleasure and wondered if it wasn’t symptomatic of a spiritual or emotional deformity.

Bob Comet, a retired librarian … brings to mind John Williams’ Stoner and Thoreau’s chestnut about ‘lives of quiet desperation,’ but it is telling that deWitt chooses to capture him at times when his life takes a turn.There is, for example, the ­inappropriately flirtatious Brighty; there’s Maria, “sly to the world’s foolishness”; and there’s Jill, ­struggling to cope with pain: “She spoke of a wish to measure it, a ­volume or weight she might assign it, to share with doctors, with strangers, bus drivers. The manager suggests that Bob simply show up every day, that his simple but constant presence might be more comforting to people “in a state of letting go” than high-flown declarations of the power of literature. 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. 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. And the divergent possibilities in the novel’s ambiguous ending scene give readers two very different stories to ponder after the final word.

Patrick deWitt is one of my favourite novelists working today because his previous four books were all fantastic. Bob’s experiences are imbued with melancholy but also a bright, sustained comedy; he has a talent for locating bizarre and outsize players to welcome onto the stage of his life. The Next Chapter 1:40 DOG EARED: Patrick deWitt on Jane Bowles' Two Serious Ladies Featured VideoPatrick deWitt reveals what keeps him coming back to the novel, Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles. Every ten or fifteen steps she paused and groaned, but her resistance was minor, and they made their plodding advancement against the weather. If the plot had continued along the path of Bob’s love for books and his interactions with the residents I would have been much happier.But soon he was shivering and damp; when a police car pulled up at a red light, Bob waved to the policeman to get his attention.