On a long train ride deep into Patrick deWitt’s The Librarianist, a preposterous woman named June contrasts sorrow and melancholy. Melancholy, June says, “is the wistful identification of time as thief, and it is rooted in memories of past love and success. […] Sorrow is the understanding you shall not get what you crave and, perhaps, deserve, and it is rooted in, or encouraged by, excuse me, the death impulse.” Beside June, her grumpy friend Ida has made the mistake of falling asleep during the speech and wakes up to find that her Baby Ruth has gone missing. Turning, June says in wincing narration, “we are prepared for melancholy, but we must also and at the same time steel ourselves against the likelihood of sorrow.”
Patrick deWitt’s novels, full of droll humor over sadness, exist for just such steeling. “Sad life, sad life,” a character muses in his breakout novel, The Sisters Brothers, upon being forced to whip his horse. The small cruelties of life, of losing a spouse in Ablutions or of having to leave home in Undermajordomo Minor, get magnified by his style and sharpened by his humor. As he has incorporated and developed his own flavor of absurdist genre farce, equal parts Robert Walser and Angela Carter, deWitt has used each new setting to explore how a wide range of characters endure such cruelties. In the process—most refined through Undermajordomo Minor, French Exit, and now The Librarianist—deWitt has employed his comic sensibilities to highlight the displays of genuine humanity and kindness that help us withstand sorrow.
The Librarianist begins with Bob Comet, age 71 in the winter of 2005, when he finds an elderly woman stranded and catatonic, staring at the energy drinks in a convenience store. Bob thinks she’ll be no trouble, since she has no weapon, but the convenience store owner insists he remove her. “You know how many ways there are to freak out without a weapon?” the owner says. “Literally one million ways.” Bob brings the woman, whose nametag reads Chip, to Gambell-Reed Senior Center, and the caretaker, Maria, and her residents are charming enough that he soon begins volunteering on a regular basis. The experience brings Bob into contact with his own past, which he finds staid and uninteresting but which proves haunted and dazzling. Through flashbacks to postwar Portland and a childhood episode running away from home, it becomes clear that even the quietest lives comprise untold depth and consequence.
Bob Comet as a character is far from generic, but he is in many aspects what one imagines a librarian to be, and what one imagines an elderly person to be. He is a quiet eccentric who lives in a mint-colored house, the same one his mother raised him in. He loves his routines and has “no craving for company,” steady and innocuous. He’s the kind of person who, leaving a pharmacy, wonders “if the security alarm [will] sound even though [he’s] not stolen anything.” At one point, Bob’s wife Connie asks him, “Why do you read rather than live?” Even Bob’s own mother looks “into Bob’s face as though she were looking around a corner.” Bob is content, “quiet within the structure of himself,” and never at the center of conflicts, even such as occur in his life. Multiple times the narrator mentions Bob’s “hopes of achieving a smallness.” DeWitt’s enormous skill is apparent in how he makes conflict and intrigue swirl around Bob without corrupting him.
The novel leaps back in time to Bob’s first years as a librarian in Portland, when he meets his to-be wife, Connie, and his to-be friend, Ethan. Connie, the daughter of a religious fanatic, and Ethan, an energetic philanderer on the run from his lover’s vindictive husband, both stumble upon Bob in the library. These two form the core of Bob’s story and the engine of the novel’s plot, such as it is, as they become entangled and elope in secret and leave Bob devastated. What he reverts to, what sustains him, is his “uncomplicated love for such things as paper, and pencils, and pencils writing on paper,” his simple and faithful life of quiet work. He’s devastated but heroic in his stolid plodding on after having been shafted, and he soon is alone again and stays that way.
But one picks up a Patrick deWitt novel waiting for him to break from a form. In each book, what begins as a conventional narrative inevitably takes a hard left a good chunk of the way through. In The Sisters Brothers, a pair of brothers and assassins set out to kill a man, but one of them falls in love with a hotel maid who rejects him due to his weight, and he decides to prioritize his diet. In Undermajordomo Minor, the comedic story of a manservant sent to live in a Baron’s castle turns suddenly to a scene of an orgy its protagonist hears when stuck behind a curtain. In French Exit, a story of a widow’s departure for Europe becomes a séance to contact a cat. It’s as if deWitt’s novels do a kind of costume change in mid-stream, emerging in a new and prim shape before returning to the tale at hand.
In The Librarianist, the most marked departure of this kind occurs when the novel jumps back in time yet again to an episode when Bob, scared and confused by his mother’s sexual relationship with her boss, runs away from home and takes up with a troupe of actors he meets on a train. The bulk of the action takes place in real locations in Portland and relishes an authentic specificity of place, but the childhood episode escapes into fantasy, a fictional town called Mansfield and a fictional Hotel Elba with “blue-painted stairs.” The dialogue of the troupe’s leaders, June and Ida, forms the core of the section’s comedy and eccentricity. Their discussions — a prolonged argument about soup, an imagined and superfluous criminal backstory for a character, and a discussion of how to navigate the feelings of “quite an emotional cook” — take on a liveliness and ready absurdity that often sparkles more than the scenes at Gambell-Reed Senior Center.
That is to say, deWitt’s novelistic strengths shine in this looser, picaresque form through which he can follow his comedic instincts without worrying too much about getting back on track. Like Dickens, his comedic characters steal every scene from his protagonists, who are admirable but tame. The child Bob often exists mostly to pitch lines for June and Ida to hit. DeWitt’s unusual talent is to wrest unending delight from tedious arguments, a perverse entertainment with roots in the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett and Robert Walser. These arguments act as interludes, so that when we return to Bob’s present dilemma toward the end of the novel, the reader feels refreshed rather than burdened.
What distinguishes deWitt from his harsher British forebears is his fondness for showing scenes of simple kindness. When Bob is away from home and caught in a celebration in the streets for the end of the war, a sheriff offers him a ride. The sheriff treats those in the street gently and reassures Bob that he’s in only “a very mild and manageable amount of trouble.” The sheriff then drives him to Portland himself. When Bob falls later in his old age, a young man selling windows calls an ambulance and helps Bob as well as he can. When Bob says the young man doesn’t have to stay, he replies, “What’s five minutes?”
The Librarianist shows more clearly than deWitt’s previous novels an unusual type of absurdity that, rather than reinforcing nihilism or social critique, underscores a belief in the potential for human goodness. DeWitt admits in interviews that this was a difficult book to write, and perhaps it is because benevolence is difficult to convey. Yet who should convey it but the only character who has steeled himself against sorrow? Bob Comet, who has endured abandonment and deception without end, still finds in his life reasons to be kind to those around him. Teaching for the first time at Gambell-Reed Senior Center, he states: “I do believe that, at our best, there is a link connecting us.”
[Published by Ecco on July 4, 2023, 352 pages, $30.00 hardcover]