Biblioracle: It’s hard to make happiness interesting and dramatic. Patrick deWitt does so in ‘The Librarianist’

Back when I was teaching literature and writing courses at the college level, my students, nice young people with lives of promise in front of them, would occasionally express a certain amount of frustration at the books, stories and poetry I would ask them to read.

“Why does everything end so horribly?” they said. “Aren’t there any happy stories that get published?” they asked.

I had different answers at different times. Sometimes I said that the stories simply reflected life, the desperate struggle for happiness, likely to culminate in disappointment and thwarted hopes. I tried to smile when I said this to signal that I wasn’t being wholly serious, except that I was.

In writing classes, I would point out how hard it was to make happiness interesting and dramatic. I started giving an explicit assignment to write a happy story and students would report back being bored by their own work.

It is very difficult to write an interesting and compelling book in which people are good to each other, where bad things happen but characters are resilient and even happy.

Patrick deWitt has pulled off this feat in his new novel, “The Librarianist” and I found the whole reading experience utterly charming.

“The Librarianist” is the story of Bob Comet, a retired librarian living in Portland who volunteers at a somewhat rundown senior center after he finds and returns a wayward resident, a woman named Chip.

Bob is single, friendless, lives alone, and spends his days going for long walks and reading books. We learn that he had a brief marriage and a single powerful friendship, but they are long in the past. He is alone, but not lonely or unhappy. He is simply himself.

At first, Bob proposes that he come and read to the residents, but they are quickly bored with Bob’s stories, and he instead starts to hang out, interacting with and getting to know the odd array of characters who inhabit the center. When Chip again goes missing, Bob engages in the search, a process that ultimately reveals that he and Chip have a past connection.

From there, the novel dives into Bob’s past, first his early years as a librarian, his marriage and alienation from his wife and best friend, and then an episode from his childhood when he ran away and spent several days at a once grand, now crumbling hotel on the Oregon coast.

Much of what works here is deWitt’s inherent wit when he gets characters talking to each other, a trait that’s well in evidence in previous novels like “The Sisters Brothers” and “The French Exit.” The dialogue is fresh and characters come alive immediately on the page and there’s simply an energy to deWitt’s books that make them pleasurable to spend time with, and that’s all on display in “The Librarianist.”

Bob Comet has plenty of what we might call “trauma” in his life, growing up without a father and with a mother who doesn’t seem to understand him. The love of his life leaves him for his best friend and he never speaks to either of them again. But these traumas do not define him.

Bob is quietly determined to be content, though it is clear his engagement with folks at the senior center is a sign from his subconscious that as content as he is, he craves more human contact, and as the reader we wish this for him.

Seeing people slowly grow close may not seem dramatic, but deWitt makes it work because he makes us care about these people, which is a kind of miracle that will never cease to amaze me.

John Warner is the author of “Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities.”

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Book recommendations from the Biblioracle

John Warner tells you what to read based on the last five books you’ve read.

1. “The Lincoln Highway” by Amor Towles

2. “Crossroads” by Jonathan Franzen

3. “Rabbit, Run” by John Updike

4. “Daisy Jones and The Six” by Taylor Jenkins Reid

5. “On the Road” by Jack Kerouac

— Milton L., Western Springs, Illinois

I think Milton will enjoy the ensemble drama of middle-aged men returning to their hometown to renew friendships and figure out what life is going to mean going forward in Ron Carlson’s “Return to Oakpine.”

1. “Lessons in Chemistry” by Bonnie Garmus

2. “Small Great Things” by Jodi Picoult

3. “Bridget Jones’s Diary” by Helen Fielding

4. “My Brilliant Friend” by Elena Ferrante

5. “The Woman in Cabin 10″ by Ruth Ware

— Daisy P., Schenectady, New York

Francine Prose always delivers a satisfying reading experience, and “Blue Angel” should have the right mix of character and story intrigue to keep Daisy invested.

1. “The Sympathizer” by Viet Thanh Nguyen

2. “A Thousand Acres” by Jane Smiley

3. “No Country for Old Men” by Cormac McCarthy

4. “Giovanni’s Room” by James Baldwin

5. “In Cold Blood” by Truman Capote

— Neil P., Chicago

Classics and prizewinners galore here. I’m pointing Neil toward a book that I thought deserved more acclaim than it received at the time, “Morningside Heights” by Joshua Henkin.

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Send a list of the last five books you’ve read and your hometown to biblioracle@gmail.com