“Bob Comet is a retired librarian passing his solitary days
surrounded by books and small comforts in a mint-colored house in Portland,
Oregon. One morning on his daily walk he encounters a confused elderly woman
lost in a market and returns her to the senior center that is her home. Hoping
to fill the void he's known since retiring, he begins volunteering at the
center. Here, as a community of strange peers gathers around Bob, and following
a happenstance brush with a painful complication from his past, the events of
his life and the details of his character are revealed.”
Most of the novel is taken up with Comet’s past, with only a
small part set in 2005/2006, where we learn of his adventures as an unhappy
runaway child during the last days of the Second World War, of his true love
that is stolen away, and pride and purpose he finds as a career librarianist.
What sustains the novel is Bob, who is sort of a straight man surrounded by a
number of outsized people like Connie and Ethan – and the ones in the
retirement home, as well as June and Ida, who we see in the latter half of the
book (and characters straight out of Dickens).
The Librarianist is, perhaps,
deWitt’s most accessible novel, though it’s more prone to clichés of the genre
than previous tales. I can identify a lot with Bob, an introvert, as well. Still,
I found the book effective, with its dark
humor and compassion little seen in today’s fiction; a moving and delightful character study that
is warmhearted with a likable hero.
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