PositiveTimes Literary Supplement\"DeWitt has set himself a difficult task, one of the most challenging that faces a fiction-maker: to render compelling the life of a putatively dull man. The Librarianist meets this challenge by keeping those still waters defiantly still, even as life carries Bob into situations of varying vividness and complexity ... The Librarianist is unyielding in its defiance of our arguably too-set expectations about how novels should depict human interiority in times of flux, crisis, or transition. Bob Comet is no comet; he is a steady, low-voltage star, a pinprick of light who only partially awakens to the complexity of his own life. By the end, I came to admire Patrick deWitt’s commitment to the mission he has set himself: to render a figure who is not beaten up by loss or reformed by insight, a man who remains, nearly always, resolutely himself.\
Anthony Marra
PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)... big, messy, ambitious and rambling ... braids together the overly familiar and bracingly fresh – surely this is the first novel to drop a canny, dynamic Italian woman into 1940s Hollywood. Yet even before the author lists his sources in nearly six pages of credits at the novel’s end, we know he has done his homework, because scarcely a note goes unstruck, whether laying on period details such as the Pacific Electric Red Car, Perino’s restaurant and Bullock’s department store, or – in the contemporary historical novel’s version of political correctness – bringing on stage every possible variant of the Hollywood player, including a Chinese American, a Japanese American, an African American and a recognizable raft of German-Jewish émigrés. Yes, they were all there; but do they all need to be here? ... The relationship Marra draws between Maria and Artie produces more natural storytelling ... Regrettably long stretches of the Hollywood chapters read (and sound) like the B-movies they poke such gentle fun at, with nearly every character ready with a smart crack or perfectly honed riposte ... More subtle are the passages set in Italy...Marra inhabits this world with tender curiosity. He shows how, in times of conflict and displacement, surrogate families constitute themselves from the most unlikely figures. He gives generous attention to subordinate characters such as Concetta ... Memorable, also, are Giuseppe’s letters to his daughter, which a local police officer censors by slicing out parts of the text; a lifetime later, in the most beautiful scene in the novel, Maria will receive and reassemble these missing words ... Even in the Los Angeles sections the Italian characters bring out the best in Marra, who deepens Maria by investigating her complicated relationship with her bitter but resilient mother, Annunziata, and retains an affectionate regard for her colourful Italian aunts, who, it turns out, are inspired by, and bear the names of, Anthony Marra’s own great-aunts, Mimi, Lala and Pep. Mine what (and whom) you know for the authentic: is this the takeaway from Mercury Pictures Presents?
