REVIEW: THE LIBRARIANIST

Three-or-so remarkable things have happened to Bob Comet in his seventy-or-so years, and those three-or-so things are remarked upon in The Librarianist. the new novel from Patrick deWitt.

Discovering a lost woman on his daily outing, the retired librarian returns her to the care from which she's wandered. Upon meeting the residents there, charming and difficult in equal measures, he decides to volunteer both his time and his knowledge of books. This is the third thing that happens to Bob Comet in his life. A life that, when shared briefly, inspires pause in one resident. After some thought, he wonders, "What's the German word for pity, scorn, and awe happening all at the same time?"

Readers familiar with deWitt, who made his nut with his second novel, The Sisters Brothers, maintaining his measured balance of sardonic wit across the fable Undermajordomo Minor and the mannered French Exit, will find themselves right at home here, but might also be wondering about the sparseness of that home. Compared to those previous books, and their previous protagonist, The Librarianist and Bob Comet is markedly more staid. But in its staidness, in its compounding pity, scorn, and awe into a single, long word, The Librarianst turns out to be deWitt's most compassionate and genuinely insightful book.

None of this is to say that nothing happens in the book--in fact, three-or-so things happen--but that the sparseness of things allows for a ruminative space, the mundanity makes for small, acute revelations. Such as the advice that a young Bob is given by a hotelier during the first thing that happens to him: "Accept whatever happiness passes your way, and in whatever form... Because it's a fool who argues with happiness, while the wiser man accepts it as it comes, if it comes at all." It's a beautiful, sad insight, and in the quiet library that this book sometimes is, it's loud and it carries.