Discovering a talented author is pure joy. The Librarianist puts Patrick DeWitt right on the favorite list for this reader for his funny, straight-forward, yet transfixing writing style. Ann Tyler comes to mind.
Seventy-one-year-old Bob Comet is a retired librarian who is feeling like his functional purpose in life is gone. When he helps a lost and confused resident of a senior center find her way back to the center, he decides to volunteer there. At first, he pretentiously and comically tries to read aloud to the elderly residents which fails. So, he decides to just BE with them and consequently becomes attached.
This is a stretch for Bob. DeWitt writes, "Bob was quiet within the structure of himself...walled in by books and the stories of the lives of others". When Bob encounters someone at the senior center who played a monumental role in his young adult life, the story catapults back in time to Bob's brief and only marriage, his childhood, and then back to elderly Bob.
At a young age Bob realizes he has a gift for invisibility. DeWitt writes, "Bob was not tormented by his peers because his peers did not see him. His teachers were prone to forgetting and reforgetting his name. He would have been a highly successful bank robber". Consequently, twenty-four-year-old Bob is slightly surprised when he makes a friend in charismatic, handsome Ethan. Later in life, Bob describes Ethan as a natural-born room changer. Bob wonders if he's "simply exotic in his plainness and functions as merely a straight man for Ethan". When Bob begins a romance with a young woman, Connie, that he meets at his library, he wants to keep the two apart. Ethan has a history of cheating that rarely seems to cause him worry or regret. Bob experiences "ripe horror" when Connie and Ethan finally meet, and sparks fly between the two. Thus, ultimately and inevitably, Bob is betrayed.
This sad episode in Bob's life contrasts with an adventure he has at age eleven in 1945. Bob decides to run away when he discovers his single mom is dating an unlikeable man. Young Bob takes a train and a bus until he eventually latches on to a pair of travelling thespians and winds up on the California coast at the Elba Hotel. There he spends four days with the colorful, ostentatious duo and the other memorable hotel residents, learning to play the snare drum for their act, until a police officer discovers the missing Bob and escorts him back to Portland. This event impacts Bob greatly and as an old man still dreams fondly of the Elba.
Patrick DeWitt paints a picture by stringing together vignettes which bring the novel back full circle to elderly Bob. Bob's staidness is made colorful through the details of his life's episodes, much like everyone else. There's charm in the beguiling simplicity of this tale. As DeWitt puts it, "Bob had not been particularly good or bad in his life. Like many, like most, he rode the center line". Bob's ordinary nature, come to life through DeWitt's skillful chronicling, makes him lovable, fascinating and relatable. The Librarianist gets five out of five stars, and I will now pick up anything by this author.
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