An old man remembers: The Librarianist, by Patrick deWitt, reviewed

It’s a mark of how difficult Patrick deWittis to pigeonhole that I’m tempted to reach for reductive mash-ups to sell you his winning fifth novel. The lovechild of Elizabeth Strout and Wes Anderson? Katherine Heiny meets the Coen Brothers? It’s not quite any of that.

On the surface, The Librarianist is his most conventional narrative yet (the Man Booker shortlisted The Sisters Brothers was an absurdist western; his other novels are similarly left field). A chance encounter leads the friendless, but ‘not unhappy per se’, retired librarian Bob Comet to volunteer at the Gambell-Reed Senior Center, where he forges new bonds and reflects on his past.

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But it’s odder and funnier than that suggests. For a start, the narrative arc is all over the place. Bookended by the present, the middle section explores Bob’s emerging literary vocation, interwoven with a genuinely gut-punching tale of romantic betrayal. So far, so conventional; but the end is startlingly abrupt, and more than 100 pages are devoted to the four days Bob spent as a child runaway in the company of two middle-aged lesbian travelling players and their performing dogs. Why, you wonder (though the interlude looms large in Bob’s memory too), while enjoying every perplexing second.

Then there’s the particularity of deWitt’s language, and his delight in incongruity. A convenience store clerk points ‘a two-foot beef jerky rod like a cutlass’. The father of Bob’s wife Connie is against ‘sunglasses, calendars, watches. Escalators, elevators. Police, government, doctors, medicine’, and for ‘gender segregation. Sterilisation of criminals. Public transportation. The death penalty. Disease. Gardening.’ It can verge on the mannered – Ida and June, the travelling players, occasionally feel too delighted by their eccentricity. I’m not wholly sold, either, on ‘succumb to the familiar tradition’ as a euphemism for sex (though it’s not prudishness; in the same sequence there’s a delicious description of a man with ‘a tiny little ruby-red ass like a ten-year-old boy who’d just been spanked’).