I think each Patrick deWitt novel is going to be the one that helps everyone fall in love with his writing, but The Librarianist could finally do it ... DeWitt's dialogue moves with the speed and precision of great conversation and its jokes sneak up on you, more like a wisp of wind on your cheek than someone tapping you on the shoulder to tell you something funny ... Bright and entertaining from beginning to end.
Mr. deWitt’s smoothest book by far, one more prone than usual to clichés...but also more warmhearted. It shares the attributes of its hero: likable, unshowy, somewhat dull but reliably soothing.
A somewhat artificial premise ... Amusing ... But the energy picks up considerably — and just in time — in the novel’s second section, which jumps back half a century ... The quick progress and fraught terms of their relationship, which can be both funny and poignant, are the heart of the novel. And there’s some outlandish drama here, too ... A novel about quiet decency in an age short on quietude and decency is nothing to complain about, of course. But simple, decent lives are what most of us lead, so we know that tone well ... The Librarianist never gives us an urgent reason to check it out.
Offer[s] simple pleasures, minimal conflict and page after page of low-key charm ... Heartier fare, making decades of Bob Comet come alive — even if they’re relatively uneventful ... [A] poignant character study ... DeWitt’s writing and endearing characters create a memorable world.
Shorn of his usual exuberance. He opts instead for a character study of almost defiant gentleness ... DeWitt’s fondness for eccentric minor characters does liven things up a touch, but not to levels of page-turning excitement. The opening section also ends with a bona fide plot twist, if not a terribly plausible one ... The only answer I can think of is that he has deliberately set himself the challenge of making an interesting novel out of a largely boring life. As to whether he succeeds, the answer is 'sort of'.
The aching heart of The Librarianist is a piercing seriocomic character study of isolation and abandonment. Would that deWitt had left his more flamboyant tendencies in the drawer for this one.
A quirky, affectionate portrait of an introverted loner who makes some surprising connections late in life, DeWitt tames the outlandishness without sacrificing his offbeat humor. His bemused sense of compassion for his characters recalls Anne Tyler, with whom he shares a soft spot for misfits, along with a firm conviction that even supposedly ordinary people lead extraordinary lives.
A gentler work than deWitt’s best-known novel ... Twainian ... No one writes loopier, funnier dialogue ... DeWitt’s dialogue oscillates between an easy vernacular and old-fashioned flourishes.
Bob is defined not so much by his needs and desires as by the absence thereof ... His innocent unworldliness and extreme passivity make him an atypical protagonist, but also a somewhat underwhelming one ... It’s a shame, because deWitt is a genial and engaging storyteller ... The Librarianist is tidily crafted and pleasantly life-affirming in the way twee novels can sometimes be, but the grown-up reader might very well find themselves – like Connie all those years ago – wanting more.
Th[e] section of The Librarianist, where Bob discovers he’s not even the center of his own love story, is where deWitt’s prose is most impressive ... The rest of the novel, unfortunately, pales a little in comparison.
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.
Like a good book, every life is full of stories, some joyous, some sad. The conjurer’s trick deWitt performs here is to lull readers into believing they’re about to follow one particular story, then to make it disappear in favor of something deeper and more nuanced ... DeWitt’s transitions aren’t always smooth, but book lovers will adore this large cast of eccentrics anyway ... Another charmer.
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.
Readers come to deWitt...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.
Stylistically, there are certainly resemblances to his previous books – they’re all rather funny, in a quirky kind of way – but each one is unique. One might think of the Canadian author’s career as composed of a series of extraordinarily vivid tessellated patterns. If you’ve never read him, think of him as the literary equivalent of, say, the filmmaker Wes Anderson: deadpan tales of dysfunction and disappointment, heavy on the whimsy, light, bright, beguiling, perhaps a little solicitous, and yet also always somehow sad ... DeWitt’s great gift lies in his ability to depict the Everyman in extremis – heroism hidden in plain sight.
What differentiates The Librarianist from other novels in this oeuvre is DeWitt’s humor and ability to write broadly drawn characters and situations without making them seem like caricatures ... If you’ve read DeWitt’s The Sisters Brothers, you might not think of him as a writer who is kind to his characters, but he is here. One never gets the feeling that the author is punishing his character. The disappointments and heartbreak Bob experiences throughout his life are laced with just the right levels of absurdity, grace, and humor. It’s the gentle level of absurdity to Bob’s life story that differentiates him from similar characters. The Librarianist probably won’t change your life, but reading it might help you recognize the beauty of a ordinary life, if only for a few hours.
A bittersweet tale ... hough 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.
