I think you’re either a fan of Patrick deWitt’s style of humour or you’re absolutely not. It could be described as ‘quirky’ but I loathe that word, so instead I’ll go with bizarro. Anyway, his latest novel, The Librarianist, is classic deWitt.

Bob Comet is a retired librarian living in Portland, Oregon and passing his days surrounded by books and small comforts.

When the work was over there was the maintenance of his home and person and of course his reading, which was a living thing, always moving, eluding, growing, and he knew it could not end, that it was never meant to end.

An outsider may consider Bob lonely, but his solitary life is all he has ever known, and there’s safety in it for him.

Of course, he’d had instances of minor camaraderie, even romance, through his school years; but none of these achieved any definition or meaning to Bob. The truth was that people made him tired.

One morning on his daily walk, he encounters a confused elderly woman lost in a market and returns her to the senior centre that is her home. Hoping to fill the void he’s known since retiring, he begins volunteering at the centre. Here, Bob meets a community of strange peers, and following a chance brush with a painful period from his past, the events of his life are revealed.

Without question, my favourite aspect of deWitt’s writing is the dryly humorous detail, particularly evident in the dialogue and the descriptions of various characters.

Jill was a sincerely negative human being with unwaveringly bad luck and an attitude of ceaseless headlong indignation.

June said, “May I ask if it was your good arm?
“Anyway it was not a bad one. I think the truth is that once an arm is taken from you, you can’t help but recall it as the arm to end all arms.

“…some people, when they enter a room, the room changes. And your father was a natural-born room-changer.”

My least favourite aspect of this book was the flashback to Bob’s childhood, and his brief time as a runaway during the last days of the Second World War. It’s deWitt at his most outlandish but felt out-of-sync with adult-Bob. Flashback scenes usually inform, or give context to the adult character, but young-Bob seemed divorced from adult-Bob. So, I was hardly surprised to hear deWitt speak about the writing of The Librarianist last week, when he said that he wrote the runaway section first, and then literally lost the document. He almost abandoned the novel, but eventually wrote the adult-Bob sections, and rewrote young-Bob last. The result was an idiosyncratic structure, and a story that deWitt said leans a little more to the sad than his usual ‘…comedy/ tragedy ratio…’.

“I like the book. It’s imperfections are fascinating to me. Very often mistakes lead to something worthwhile.”

And after hearing him speak, I warmed to the young-Bob sections. I also understood more about adult-Bob and the quiet celebration of books and reading that deWitt has so beautifully embedded in this novel. Bob’s pride and dedication to his career as a librarian, and his hilarious attempts to read works of classic literature to the residents of the senior centre were echoing for me when deWitt said that of himself, “…reading is my quest…” (and therefore doesn’t like recommendations). Is Patrick Bob…?!

3/5

The cart held four rows of rounded lumps, ten lumps per row, half of them whiteish and furred, the other half dark brown and resembling brains in modeled miniature. “And who are these gentlemen?” asked the man in the big beret.
“Peanut butter balls and raisin balls.” ….
“Is there a shortage of food in the pantry?” he asked. “Because it seems to me these are some bullshit snacks.”