Patrick deWitt, a droll satirist with a pointed taste for the bizarre, made his name with novels full of clever literary hijinks, including “Undermajordomo Minor” and “The Sisters Brothers.” His last book, “French Exit” (2018), was a loopy mother-son “tragedy of manners” that channeled both Noël Coward and Wes Anderson.
In his new novel, “The Librarianist,” a quirky, affectionate portrait of an introverted loner who makes some surprising connections late in life, DeWitt tames the outlandishness without sacrificing his offbeat humor. His bemused sense of compassion for his characters recalls Anne Tyler, with whom he shares a soft spot for misfits, along with a firm conviction that even supposedly ordinary people lead extraordinary lives.
We meet Bob Cosmic, a retired, 71-year-old former librarian, in the mint-colored house in Portland, Oregon, he inherited from his mother, who raised him on her own. DeWitt’s mild-mannered hero is a man with “a gift for invisibility.”
Despite lacking both friends and family, “this absence didn’t bother him, and he felt no craving for company.” Long divorced under painful circumstances we eventually learn about, Bob is content to experience the world mainly through books. He is “not unhappy” with his quiet life spent “reading, cooking, eating, tidying, and walking,” and “had long given up on the notion of knowing anyone, or of being known.” But, as we also eventually learn, his life was not without its moments of drama and excitement.
A chance encounter with a disoriented woman in the local 7-Eleven on one of his daily walks turns out to be a momentous turning point in Bob’s solitary life. He offers to escort the woman back to the senior center where she lives, and, impressed by the place and the caring, capable woman at its helm, decides to volunteer his services as a reader to the motley group of residents.
It quickly becomes apparent that the glory of Russian literature is lost on the residents, about half of whom have dementia. What they need is affable companionship. The director, Maria, suggests that instead of books, Bob should circulate himself.
As Bob connects with residents like Linus Webster, a gregarious man in an electric wheelchair with “gargantuan appetites running unchecked across the length of several decades,” but also “an animation about him that spoke of a defiant life force; something like joy, but mutant,” he wonders about their lives. And this causes him to review his own.
The novel scrolls back to key episodes in Bob’s youth and early adulthood, including his one and only great friendship with a man named Ethan Augustine, who is his opposite in every way: as unreliable as Bob is dependable, as lively as Bob is staid, as outgoing as Bob is introverted. When Ethan, a handsome roué who’s frequently on the run from outraged husbands, meets Bob for lunch at The Finer Diner, a joint which smelled of burned coffee and wet rags, he asks, “Finer than what?”
Bob’s friendship with Ethan unfortunately coincided – or should we say collided – with his one and only love affair and marriage, to a fun-loving free spirit who can’t understand why Bob reads so much. She’d rather that he focused on living – and on her.
The longest flashback is to Bob’s strangest escapade, when he ran away at 11 and, in a crumbling Victorian seaside hotel, took up for a few days with a pair of traveling stage performers who seem like walk-ons from an Elizabeth McCracken story. It’s a peculiar digression inserted into the novel just when we’d rather be hearing about recent developments in Bob’s life, but we come to understand its significance.
Bob has always been everybody’s straight man, but he’s not as unruffled by events as his placid demeanor might indicate. Some experiences take decades to resonate, including this advice from the seaside hotel manager: “Someday, Bob, when you’re an aged specimen like me, and you find yourself suddenly enamored of folding the laundry or edging your lawn, remember your long-gone friend Leslie More telling you to accept whatever happiness passes your way, and in whatever form.” Young Bob responded with a noncommittal “Okay.” But old Bob understands.
Old Bob also finally articulates an answer to the question about why he reads so much. His explanation is at the crux of “The Librarianist,” and indeed of deWitt’s work:
“There is the element of escape, which is real enough. … But also we read as a way to come to grips with the randomness of our being alive. To read a book by an observant, sympathetic mind is to see the human landscape in all its odd detail, and the reader says to him or herself, Yes, that’s how it is, only I didn’t know it to describe it. There’s a fraternity achieved, then: we are not alone.”
In case we are in any doubt, Bob underscores his point: “I do believe that, at our best, there is a link connecting us. A lifetime of reading has confirmed this for me.”
“The Librarianist” offers further confirmation.
Heller McAlpin reviews books regularly for the Monitor, The Wall Street Journal, and NPR.