The Librarianist

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It stood perched on a hill, looming over its neighbors on both sides and looking very much like the cliched image of a haunted house. Of course, the section at the Hotel Elba goes to show the extent to which an ordinary life can be deceptive, though this comes at a cost on the level of emotional resonance. A novel about quiet decency in an age short on quietude and decency is nothing to complain about, of course.

The quick progress and fraught terms of their relationship, which can be both funny and poignant, are the heart of the novel. I wish we could stop and browse but they’ll be worrying about you, and we don’t want them to worry, do we? Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior.This is his fifth and latest novel – and the only other I have read – and it retains something of the same offbeat humour and eccentric cast list (even including a Sheriff), but is a far more introspective novel and in fact is even blurbed as “a wide-ranging and ambitious document of the introvert’s condition”. But when I thought we were getting back to the present timeline, we instead go back further in the past to see how Bob ran away as a kid and had an adventure of sorts.

DeWitt’s dialogue oscillates between an easy vernacular and old-fashioned flourishes (“one so young as yourself”), a style perfectly suited to the Western milieu of The Sisters Brothers, but that tends to give his other novels an unreal tinge.The dream arrives like a bit of atmosphere, the melancholy reflectiveness of an old man’s waning years, but it is really the novel’s central question: What did Bob Comet find at the Hotel Elba and then yearn for the rest of his life? Sorrow is the understanding you shall not get that which you crave and, perhaps, deserve, and it is rooted in, or encouraged by, excuse me, the death impulse.

The year is 2005, and this dreary state of affairs stems partly from the fact that shortly after he married her in 1959, Bob’s wife ran off with his best friend.When we meet Bob, he lives alone in his mint-colored house in Portland, Oregon, surrounded by his books and his memories of a life lived with dignity and mostly, in solitude. Beneath the text there was an address, and beneath the address was the image of an imposing Craftsman home with medieval touches—a tower and weathervane, a wraparound porch. Readers waiting for another book as irrepressible and strange as “The Sisters Brothers” will have to keep waiting.

A forty-something-year-old woman in pale green scrubs and a beige cardigan was walking up to meet Bob.

His favorite dream was that he was alone and it was early in the morning, and he was setting up for the day, and all was peaceful and still and his shoes made no sound as he walked across the carpeting, an empty bus shushing past on the damp street. That international success set expectations high, but deWitt, who seems as unflappable as his deadpan assassins, has shown no signs of feeling boxed in. The final third is another time jump to Bob’s childhood where he meets a pair of travelling actors and he sort of helps them in their local production.