The Librarianist

February 1, 2023

DeWitt's Librarianist is retired Bob Comet, who has always lived through books but whose life--and complicated past--open up after he begins volunteering at the local senior center. Prepub Alert.

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Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 3, 2023
DeWitt follows up French Exit with a bittersweet tale of a retired librarian. It’s 2005 in Portland, Ore., but Bob Comet, 71, is stuck in the past. He’s lived alone since he was a young man in the house he inherited from his mother, who died when he was 23. Intensely introverted, Bob has no friends or family and communicates with the world “by walking through it, but mainly by reading about it.” One day, he follows a lost elderly woman out of a convenience store. From her name tag, he deduces she is from the local senior center and returns her there. After a tour, Bob decides to volunteer, and soon he bonds with a motley group of seniors and gradually shares details of his life. He was briefly married, having divorced 45 years earlier just months after his new bride ran off with his charismatic best man, leaving Bob with a “shock of bitterness... as if he’d been unkindly tricked.” Before, the young Bob had plenty of adventures—at 11, he ran away from home and befriended two elderly women who tried to get him to join the theater. Though Bob is quite staid, deWitt imbues the people he meets with color and quirks, leaving a trail of sparks through an otherwise low-key narrative. This one gradually takes hold until it won’t let go. Agent: Doug Stewart, Sterling Lord Literistic.

Starred review from May 1, 2023
An old man's routines are interrupted by a woman in pink in this wistful fable. Bob Comet, a retired librarian, is 71 and has lived an unremarkable life in Portland, Oregon, in a mint-colored house that belonged to his late mother. "He had no friends, per se; his phone did not ring, and he had no family." The year is 2005, and this dreary state of affairs stems partly from the fact that shortly after he married her in 1959, Bob's wife ran off with his best friend. Things begin to change for the retiree when he encounters a woman about his age in a pink sweatsuit staring at the refrigerated beverages in a 7-Eleven. After he learns that she is a resident of a nearby senior center and returns her there, he makes a startling discovery. The narrative shifts to Bob in his 20s, when he becomes a librarian and meets his wife-to-be and the man who would become his best friend, before the two betrayed him. The story shifts again, to Bob at age 11, when he ran away from home and had an adventure with two eccentric women who performed elaborate stage shows. They are among the several lesser characters who provide color and light in this gray tale. DeWitt has gained a following with the black comedy of his past three novels--French Exit (2018), Undermajordomo Minor (2015), and The Sisters Brothers (2011). The new book is different, marked by the resigned melancholy surrounding Bob, a mood not always understated: "There had been whole eras of Bob's working life where he knew a lamentation at the smallness of his existence." He brings to mind John Williams' Stoner and Thoreau's chestnut about "lives of quiet desperation," but it is telling that deWitt chooses to capture him at times when his life takes a turn. A quietly effective and moving character study.

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July 1, 2023

In deWitt's fifth novel (after French Exit), Bob Comet, a retired librarian in Portland, OR, is an unassuming man with quiet pastimes; a man with few friends and no family. But his routine life changes completely when he chances to walk into a convenience store and meets an older woman who seems lost and confused. According to the laminated card hanging around her neck, Chip lives at the Gambell-Reed Senior Center, and Bob becomes fascinated by the residents there, eventually signing up to volunteer. Finally he has landed in a place where he feels he belongs, a place he's been searching for ever since he was betrayed decades ago by the only two people he loved, his wife Connie and friend Ethan. But when Chip's son Sam arrives to take her to a more secure facility, Bob is in for a shock, and uncovering Chip's real identity leads to a difficult conversation with Sam but ultimately reconciliation with his past. VERDICT The Booker Prize--shortlisted deWitt creates an endearing character in Bob Comet, who, at the age of 72, and after a lifetime of low expectations, finds life's answers and the friends he deeply needs. This novel begs to be read.--Donna Bettencourt

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Starred review from June 1, 2023
Seventy-ish Bob Comet begins a lecture in a sparsely filled room at the Gambell-Reed Senior Center, "We read as a way to come to grips with the randomness of our being alive." Bob's audience isn't convinced, but deWitt's will be, splendidly so. His fifth novel is the unfettered tale of steady Bob and that special kind of book that reads like several in one. Bob, a retired librarianist, as his most influential teacher would have said it, starts volunteering at the senior center and finds a new topography to his otherwise-predicable days in Portland, where he still lives in his mint-green childhood home. The revelation that one of the center folks, roundly disguised, is someone from Bob's past sends him lurching back to his early adulthood and two best friendships that were ground to dust. In the wildest departure from the story at hand, Bob remembers his quite-successful turn as an 11-year-old runaway, living for four days in 1945 with traveling thespians and their dancing dogs in a ramshackle inn on the Oregon coast. Readers come to deWitt (French Exit, 2018) for his brand of slightly off-kilter storytelling blessed with exuberant characterizations, gleeful dialogue, and a proprietary blend of darkness and charm, all strung up in lights here. Gripping, random, and totally alive? Check, check, and check.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Ever since readers fell for The Sisters Brothers, which became a movie starring Joaquin Phoenix, a new deWitt is news, period.

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