Patrick deWitt has made a career out of writing eccentric characters, outsiders who lead us into a fully formed, slightly cracked, uniquely deWittian universe. His work has an oddball verve and an imaginative swagger that are singular. His books include French Exit; The Sisters Brothers, short-listed for the Booker Prize; Undermajordomo Minor; and Ablutions.
The hero of deWitt’s fifth novel, The Librarianist, is named, oxymoronically, Bob Comet. Bob does not burn brightly as he streaks across the sky. Instead, he is a kind of conscientious objector to life, someone who refuses to join the rat race for moral reasons. A man who believes not getting involved is the proper course of inaction. He is an introvert who prefers to experience the world through literature. The Librarianist is a quiet high-wire act, about a life loudly lived with an inside voice.
Accompanied by Sonny—his English cocker spaniel—deWitt spoke with me via Zoom about his new novel. “I’m just trying to get into the swing of discussing literature again after however many couple of years it’s been. I’m a little rusty,” he admitted as we began.
How’s life in Portland?
It rains [what feels like] 300 days a year here, so Portland works for me in terms of getting the books completed. In terms of whether it’s advantageous or not to my career, I don’t know. But the books come out, and I’m happy with where they land in the world.
No fear of missing out?
I suffered from that when I was younger. Now it’s sort of like the joy of missing out.
The Sisters Brothers famously started as the words “sensitive cowboys” scribbled on a piece of paper. I wondered whether this new book had a similar genesis.
This was a complicated book to write for any number of reasons. A lot of it was just the way the world felt, and the pandemic. Then, there was life stuff, some health stuff. The book was written during a tedious phase of my life, and I think maybe some of that is reflected in the tone. Hopefully it’s not tedious, but I just mean to say maybe there is a melancholic slant which I think makes sense to me now. In an earlier iteration of the book, Bob Comet was a completely different person. He had a more volatile personality, and he was an outsider, a post-beatnik weirdo outsized in keeping with the characters in my other books. Then I had a breakthrough, recognizing that Bob should be completely different. Much more introverted and quiet and still.
Bob appears sad and lonely from the outside, but he has a rich interior life from reading. I feel like I’m reading a love letter from an author to his readers.
Also to booksellers and to other authors, and primarily to librarians and people who endeavor to celebrate the written word or share it with others.
And it’s the story of an introvert. Which we don’t see so often.
Yeah, that’s really it. I think of myself as somebody who’s introverted and has been since I was a kid. When books arrived in my life, it was such a relief, because it’s a way of socializing without having to do it, actually.
Bob tried to be in the world. He was married. He had a best friend. But it didn’t end as he’d hoped.
It’s not just that he’s introverted. It’s that when he strayed from his introverted nature, he was punished. So, the return to books. It’s a complicated emotional situation. But there’s a realization he has one day, which is: All right, I’ve got work to do, which is to read every book I can get my hands on for the rest of my life and to live within the text I’m ingesting.
Libraries as safe space.
But he’s also perpetuating it. He’s giving books to the public, and there’s no commerce involved, which is certainly the most appealing part of the library to me. When I was 18, I was living in Vancouver, and I had very little money. If I bought a book, it was because I knew it would be a good book, whereas at the library, I could just grab a stack of books. It’s a scattershot campaign, but it brought me to all sorts of strange places I wouldn’t have gone.
I had a similar experience growing up in Kansas City.
I was thinking of these early formative library experiences when I was working on the book, and the sense of endlessness and infinite possibility when you enter a nice big stone library like the downtown public library in Vancouver. There’s everything in the world in that building. It’s there for you. And it’s free. It’s just amazing.
Bob takes daily walks and then one day ends up helping a lost old lady find her way back to a senior center. His natural empathy leads him back into the world.
I helped out at a senior center before the pandemic, and I don’t know that those scenes would have been written if I hadn’t. In sitting with the people there week after week and listening to their stories, I began to see them differently.
The Librarianist seems to represent an evolution in your writing. Where do you put it in comparison with your other books?
I think of Ablutions as being to the side of the rest in that it was my first book. I’m not knocking it, but I wouldn’t or couldn’t write that book again. I feel like I hit my stride with The Sisters Brothers and Undermajordomo Minor and French Exit. Those three feel like they’re of a piece to me in terms of the balance of comedy, pathos, and weirdness. When I think of this book, I don’t really know what to make of it yet, because, as you know, it takes a period of time before you know what a book’s value or worth is. But I think of it as a more traditional novel, a proper novel. It just sort of came out that way. I think it’s the first book I’ve written where there are no ghosts or spooky shit. There’s only this introverted, occasionally melancholic man, who has not that much to say. Really, he’s just living. So he’s a new kind of character for me, and I think he represents some change in my needs as a writer or my interest as a writer. One hopes that with each book there’s some sort of growth.
The novel might be less eccentric than your previous books, but Bob is perhaps your most eccentric character.
Totally. The book is filled with people who are the characters I’m sort of known for writing. But it’s the focus on Bob that represents a shift for me, which is: less being more. That’s a very common thing for many artists as they age: they make do with less, and they recognize that you get more emotional mileage out of showing less, saying less. I think that that’s probably what’s happening with me. I suppose your confidence builds over time.•
Mark Haskell Smith is the author of six novels, including Moist, Salty, and Blown, as well as three nonfiction books, most recently Rude Talk in Athens: Ancient Rivals, the Birth of Comedy, and a Writer’s Journey Through Greece.
