RaveThe Spectator (UK)\"It sounds like a criticism to say that The Librarianist feels long, but what I mean is, it feels full. The author crams a lot of life into his pages. It’s a book of fully realized minor characters ... Even more, you feel you know and care for Bob – his love of a deserted early morning library, the flashes of humour that seem to surprise even him, or his ill-advised decision to read the Center’s residents an Edgar Allan Poe story in which ‘on page three the cat had its eye cut out with a penknife’. We want him to be better than ‘not unhappy’, and perhaps, at the end, he might be. Which might be the most conventional thing about this lovely curio of a novel.\
Andrew Sean Greer
RaveThe Spectator (UK)... [a] slighter but equally charming sequel ... a sequel for those who are already sold, referencing and reprising what made the original so winning. There’s slightly less on the minor humiliations of the ‘Minor American Novelist’, which I think is wise, avoiding the in-jokiness of anecdotes about readings and author Q and As. Instead, Arthur mainly stumbles into more relatable, if esoteric, mishaps ... Greer does beautifully what Arthur’s poet lover exhorted him to do: ‘pay attention’. His magpie eye alights on sparkling road trip non-sequiturs ... If you read with the same quality of attention with which Greer writes you’re rewarded: he tucks away references and repeat phrases like Easter eggs for the careful reader. Is it bad form to mention a twist? Apologies if so, but on rereading I realise something surprising was slyly, subtly signposted ... Mainly, though, it’s huge fun. Greer’s delight in language and the comedy of incongruity is infectious ... Pain and slapstick cohabit, as they do everywhere and always ... I suspect Greer isn’t done with his creation (Less’s mother’s story looms, like Chekhov’s gun); I hope not.
