3.5 Stars
Bob is very much an introvert who is reluctant to engage with other people: “Bob had long given up on the notion of knowing anyone, or of being known. He communicated with the world partly by walking through it, but mainly by reading about it.” His ex-wife “believed Bob was reading beyond the accepted level of personal pleasure and wondered if it wasn’t symptomatic of a spiritual or emotional deformity. Bob thought her true question was, Why do you read rather than live?” He comes to recognize that “he hadn’t lived his life to its fuller potential.”
Two flashbacks dominate the story and show that his life had moments of drama and excitement when he encountered colourful characters, risk-takers who showed him a different way of life. But Bob “had a particular life fixed in his mind” and he remains steadfastly focused on that staid, stable life. The first flashback is to Bob’s early career as a librarian and his meeting his wife Connie and his best, and only, friend Ethan. Bob admits that “they had led him away from [his life’s] isolation and study and inward thought” but once they left, “he resumed his progress over that familiar ground. Bob was quiet within the structure of himself, walled in by books and the stories of the lives of others.”
The second flashback is to Bob at the age of 11 when he runs away from home and connects with two women who are travelling entertainers. Ida and June are eccentrics who “adopt” Bob for four days. This episode has had a lasting impact on Bob: the book opens with his recurring dream of the Hotel Elba where he stayed with the women, and he admits that this dream always floods his brain with “the feeling of falling in love, and he would wake up in a state of besotted reverence.” His offering to volunteer at the centre may in part be due to its looking “quite a lot like the Hotel Elba.”
The adventure with Ida and June was for me the least interesting part of the book. With its witty dialogue between quirky characters, it is entertaining in its own way, but I found it overly long. Though that escapade is Bob’s fondest memory, it does not seem to have changed or shaped him in any way; however, the ending suggests that 60 years later he finally realizes how “misshapen and imperfect” his life has been and he takes the advice he was given to “’accept whatever happiness passes your way, and in whatever form.’” Bob’s epiphany is not a dramatic one, but then it’s appropriate for an unremarkable, ordinary person, an “average Bob.”
The title of the book is interesting. Bob’s profession was that of librarian and Bob’s love of reading and books is often mentioned. However, we learn little of the books that he enjoys. Only a couple of titles are mentioned and then only in passing. More than anything he seems to love the orderliness and the quiet of a library: “He felt uncomplicated love for such things as paper, and pencils, and pencils writing on paper, and erasers and scissors and staples, paper clips, the scent of books, and the words on the pages of the books.” Just like he likes “’the idea of people,’” perhaps he likes the idea of books. His preference for the morning quiet in the library before people arrive suggests he would like the library just for himself. He sees himself as a “tool, a mechanism of the library machinery,” so perhaps the term librarianist is more appropriate than librarian.
Readers who have enjoyed deWitt’s previous novels may find that this one is more restrained, though there are still plenty of odd characters (Connie’s father, Miss Ogilvie, Ida and June, Linus) and considerable humour. I prefer this less outlandish deWitt.
No comments:
Post a Comment