Patrick Dewitt lives in Portland, Oregon, though he's originally from British Columbia, Canada. He's written five novels, of which The Librarianist is the most recent.
The Librarianist details the life and times of Bob Comet, a rather shy, retiring sort of person who's spent most of his life working in one of Portland's public libraries. In his youth Bob meets Connie, a sheltered young woman that he'll eventually marry, and later he meets Ethan, an attractive, sexually gregarious man who is Bob's opposite in nearly every respect.
In my opinion this novel, published or otherwise, remains unfinished. It's not that it's badly written, but there isn't enough story here to justify its length. About a fourth of this book consists of an almost entirely unrelated episode in Bob's childhood which bears no relation to the book's overall plot, and this "missing fourth" is, to make the book as a whole much weaker, much better than the rest of the novel. As a character Bob is a somewhat interesting construct, but who is he, really? Is he the introverted man seen at the beginning and end of this book, or is he the young boy running away from home in the "childhood interlude?" The two halves of his personality are never reconciled, and lacking a convincing fusion of these two selves The Librarianist just isn't complete.
The above-mentioned childhood interlude is great though. I grew up in Bay City, and even so I was unfamiliar with the bygone town of Bayocean and its weird history. That part of the book should have been front and center in the narrative, but apparently the author couldn't muster up enough of that vibe to sustain a longer story.
The Librarianist is definitely readable, but it consists of two halves that don't fit together. Either of these halves might have been expanded into a good book, but their shared presence in the same story adds up to a whole that's less than the sum of its parts.
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