The setting of the novel and its title intrigued me; it’s set in Portland, OR, near where I live and I love books and libraries. Is this a book about books? About loving reading? About libraries?
No, it isn’t. It isn’t about any of that, not at all.
If there is any relation to books at all, it is that the novel is about the chapters that make up the narratives of our lives. Well, Bob Comet’s life, to be specific. Bob is a quiet man, a retired and retiring kind of man, who becomes entangled in the drama and lives of the residents of a kind of retirement home near his own. While there, his interactions with the attendants and residents force him to reconsider the trajectory and decisions of his own life.
In the course of his discoveries about himself, he finds he must witness a direction his life did not take, a love lost and unrecovered.
The Librarianist is a melancholy glimpse into life and its traumas, large and small. This novel makes me think of rain in the Pacific Northwest: ever-present and daily probable, quietly dripping dripping dripping, a small cluster of molecules that is incredibly important to life. Like rain, the quotidian in The Librarianist is vital. The life that unfolds in this novel reminds me of the verdant luxury of green in moss, pine, conifer that emerges after the flush of rain.
Readers who love Stoner by John Williams or Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov will appreciate the life deWitt writes for us.
Dr JoAnn LoSavio 