Patrick deWitt has a new novel, “The Librarianist” and I found the whole reading experience utterly charming, biblioracle writes.
Back when I was teaching literature and writing courses at the college level, my students, nice young people with lives of promise in front of them, would occasionally express a certain amount of frustration at the books, stories and poetry I would ask them to read.“Aren’t there any happy stories that get published?”I had different answers at different times.
Patrick deWitt has pulled off this feat in his new novel, “The Librarianist” and I found the whole reading experience utterly charming.“The Librarianist” is the story of Bob Comet, a retired librarian living in Portland who volunteers at a somewhat rundown senior center after he finds and returns a wayward resident, a woman named Chip.
At first, Bob proposes that he come and read to the residents, but they are quickly bored with Bob’s stories, and he instead starts to hang out, interacting with and getting to know the odd array of characters who inhabit the center. When Chip again goes missing, Bob engages in the search, a process that ultimately reveals that he and Chip have a past connection.
Much of what works here is deWitt’s inherent wit when he gets characters talking to each other, a trait that’s well in evidence in previous novels like “The Sisters Brothers” and “The French Exit.” The dialogue is fresh and characters come alive immediately on the page and there’s simply an energy to deWitt’s books that make them pleasurable to spend time with, and that’s all on display in “The Librarianist.
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