Eccentrics, oddballs, and a book lover named Bob: Patrick de Witt’s new novel ‘The Librarianist’

Canadian expat novelist Patrick deWitt wears naturalism like a kind of ill-fitting dinner jacket. His preferred mode is what Katy Waldman of the New Yorker called “stealth absurdism,” flitting among genres — the neo-Western in “The Sisters Brothers”; the fairy tale in “Undermajordomo Minor”; the comedy of manners in “French Exit” — while peopling his work with eccentrics and oddballs.

All of which makes “The Librarianist,” at least in its early stages, something of a departure. The title character, Bob Comet, is a former librarian in deWitt’s hometown of Portland, Oregon, whom we first encounter waking “in a state of disappointment from a dream interrupted.” His dream involves a formative experience in the 1940s when, as a precocious 11-year-old, he ran away from home and found himself at the Hotel Elba, “a long-gone coastal location” he still recalls vividly.

In the narrative present, which takes place in the pre-pandemic, pre-recession years between 2005 and 2006, Bob lives alone in a mint-green house and spends much of his time in isolation with his beloved books. A studious child, Bob became a librarian in part because he feels more comfort in the imagined world of novels than in the real world that surrounds him. When he encounters a woman suffering dementia in a 7-Eleven store and returns her to her home, a local retirement residence called the Gambell-Reed Senior Center, he decides on a whim to volunteer his time reading to the occupants, something they react to with boredom verging on disdain.

As Bob pursues his late-life desire to minister to the old folks in Gambell-Reed, he also recalls his two formative adult relationships, with his ex-wife, Connie, and his best friend, Ethan, a fast-talking playboy who ends up stealing Connie away from him. The flashback section involving Bob’s budding romance with Connie contains flickers of the kind of eccentric figure deWitt seems so enamoured of: Connie’s father is a religious fanatic who dresses them both in hooded black capes for their trips to the library where Connie and Bob first meet. It is here, also, that he meets Ethan, hiding out from a jealous husband whose wife he’s sleeping with.

There are earlier indications of deWitt’s “stealth absurdism” in the character of Miss Ogilvie, Bob’s first boss at the library. A vicious harridan who prizes nothing so much as silence, Miss Ogilvie is a comic delight, a character on the margins of the story who fully inhabits every scene she appears in. Despite her powerful presence, however, neither she nor Connie’s father — nor, for that matter, the bombastic Ethan — fully detract from the focus on Bob and his bookish interiority, which carries “The Librarianist” forward in a spirit of what might be called insouciant melancholy.

Until, that is, a section two-thirds of the way through the novel that dramatizes the 11-year-old Bob running away from home to the Hotel Elba, where he falls in with Jane and Ida, a pair of histrionic actors preparing to put on a performance that seems ill-fated from the start. Here deWitt dispenses with any pretence of subversion and lets his absurdist flag fly, to the novel’s detriment.

Prior to the extended flashback to 1945, deWitt has been absolutely proficient in painting a portrait of a lonely man who never appeared suited for life in the world. Abandoned by the one woman he ever loved, Bob has become a portrait in loneliness and creeping old age. Indeed, the one significant moment in the entire Hotel Elba section — which includes the recipe for “frizzled beef” at a local eatery and a pair of dogs dressed as witches — involves Jane’s distinction between melancholy and sorrow. “Melancholy is the wistful identification of time as thief,” she tells young Bob. “Sorrow is the understanding you shall not get that which you crave.”

Both are applicable to Bob, a character who embodies an unspoken sadness that infuses the majority of the novel. DeWitt’s great achievement is in creating, perhaps for the first time, a character whose very ordinariness is his defining feature. Of course, the section at the Hotel Elba goes to show the extent to which an ordinary life can be deceptive, though this comes at a cost on the level of emotional resonance. The aching heart of “The Librarianist” is a piercing seriocomic character study of isolation and abandonment. Would that deWitt had left his more flamboyant tendencies in the drawer for this one.

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