Susan Orlean’s The Library Book is something of a literary hermit crab. Constructed around one of Los Angeles’s greatest civic tragedies, the April 29, 1986, fire that destroyed or damaged more than a million volumes in the Central Library downtown, it also operates as a vernacular history of the city’s library system and, through that lens, of Los Angeles itself. Then there’s the more vulnerable material: Orlean trying to create a sense of place in Southern California, after moving there with her family from the Northeast. Threaded throughout is the author’s relationship with her mother, who introduced her daughter to the joy of libraries and has now begun to slide slowly into dementia, a conflagration of a very different sort.
Does this sound like a lot? How can it not? Yet that’s the whole idea. Orlean, after all, is nothing if not a flaneur of the written word, antennae up and eyes wide open, not following the line of her subject so much as moving around and through it, ever open to the odd or unlikely juxtaposition that brings an unexpected focus to the frame. Such a sensibility drives her 1998 book, The Orchid Thief, as well as much of her reporting for the New Yorker, where she has been a staff writer since 1992.
This article appears in Issue 36 of Alta Journal.
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The Library Book is similarly wide-angled, not only in its overlapping narratives but also in its structure and its style. Beginning with Harry Peak, a would-be actor arrested for setting the fire—he was never charged—Orlean cycles through other narratives of interest, including the larger-than-life saga of Charles Fletcher Lummis, the Los Angeles Times city editor who became the city librarian in 1905.
The result is a kind of chiaroscuro, built around legacies of loss. One chapter begins with a list of what was destroyed in the inferno. Another recounts Orlean’s decision to burn a copy of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451—the irony is intentional—so she might understand an arsonist’s feelings.
“The pages burned so fast they barely crackled,” she remembers, reckoning with “the realization of how fast a thing full of human stories can be made to disappear.” That’s a heart-stopping moment, not just because the destruction of a book is taboo for Orlean but also because of how it redefines the fire in human terms. If every volume contains a lifetime, then here are a million lives taken. In those terms, the library fire becomes a holocaust.
As it turns out, the fire was most likely not a case of arson, although no cause has ever been assigned. It’s a perfectly open-ended conclusion, leaving the question of origin unresolved. In that sense, Peak, who died of complications of HIV/AIDS in 1993, becomes another emblem of disintegration. “In my opinion, it sounds like they got the wrong guy,” an arson investigator named Paul Bieber suggests to Orlean late in the telling. “It also sounds to me like there isn’t a guy to get.”•
THE LIBRARY BOOK, BY SUSAN ORLEAN
