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Patrick deWitt is not the most tech savvy bloke. When we connect over Zoom he has a problem with the camera in his laptop; indeed I never get to see him during our conversation, which he laments, not least because “I combed my hair and everything”.
But this is nothing compared with four years ago when he was last in Australia. He was here to talk about his novel, French Exit, but was already making progress on what was to be his new one, The Librarianist.
“I’m sort of a foolish person, a bit of a Luddite and I don’t really know my technology very well. And because of an error of mine I lost 50 pages … and couldn’t get them back.“
Patrick deWitt adapted his novel French Exit for the big screen, with Michelle Pfeiffer as Frances Price and Lucas Hedges as her son, Malcolm, with Small Frank between them.Credit: Sony Pictures
So, there was the Canadian novelist who had recently taken US citizenship doing the rounds at the Melbourne Writers Festival and elsewhere, meeting people, speaking at length about French Exit, all the while caught up in a writer’s nightmare – missing pages. “That was my sort of realisation as I was walking around town: I’ve lost this book, I’ll start another because this was obviously a cursed book and I should just get on with my life.”
But by the time he got home to Portland, Oregon, he found himself craving what he had written and needing to revisit the character at the heart of the manuscript.
Patrick deWitt in the ‘passable’ picture taken by his son.Credit: Gustavo deWitt
The Librarianist – yes, he did write it again, but more of that shortly – is about Bob Comet, a shy introvert who doesn’t live up to his name and used to work in a library, but now lives a quiet life untroubled by friends or family. He once had an adventure as a boy, and he once had a wife, but she left him. Now he goes about the business of life without disturbing anyone.
On the day in 2005 when the novel begins, Bob wakes from a dream of events when he was 11 at Hotel Elba that leaves him with a profound feeling of romantic love “though he’d not known that experience during his time at the hotel”.
Off he goes on his morning walk, but is stalled by an encounter with an old woman who has wandered away from an aged-care home and is in some sort of catatonic state in the local 7/11. He takes her back to the home and gradually his life – we learn all about it, which is the book’s narrative – is changed by the many people he meets and a discovery he makes.
In his gentle passivity, Bob Comet is an unusual character for deWitt, although there are plenty more familiar but unique types in the book.
His first novel, Ablutions, is narrated by an alcoholic working in a Hollywood bar; his second, the darkly comic The Sisters Brothers, shortlisted for the Booker, featured the eponymous brothers Eli and Charles, guns for hire in Oregon in the mid-19th century; the third was a sort of deadpan, deviant fairytale, Undermajordomo Minor, with a Wes Anderson-like tone, while the fourth, French Exit, which deWitt adapted for the big screen, had Frances and her 32-year-old son, Malcolm, fleeing bankruptcy in New York to Paris along with their decrepit cat, Small Frank, into whose body her late husband’s soul has transmogrified.
The pages that deWitt lost were very different from the novel we have now. Originally, Bob’s ex-wife was the librarian and he was some sort of ex-Beatnik living on the streets: “He was eccentric and much more sort of, I think, a typical Patrick deWitt character, if such a thing exists.”
Their encounter was the starting point of the book but deWitt couldn’t bring it to life so decided to write it from Bob’s point of view and turned him into a different character, a sort of witness to his own life. That’s when it all got lost.
“Part of the reason the book is told anti-chronologically is because I couldn’t face the idea of trying to recreate the pages I lost,” deWitt says. “There are just so many things you lose, all the little inspirational moments that come with writing up a piece of prose.”
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As if that wasn’t enough, after he submitted The Librarianist to his publisher he realised he had made a big error: he had written it in the first person, but “something was amiss that had been bothering me … Bob would never say this much”. It was another nightmare, but he told his editors he was going to rewrite the book in the third person.
It was the right move: “He’s quite stoic and still, so I made a lot of noise occurring around Bob, but he is still the centre of the story.”
What makes deWitt’s books so distinctive is probably their tone. There’s an eccentricity in the characters, an almost steampunk quirk to his language, and an idiosyncratic care to the prose that stresses the sound and shape of the lines. And there’s an embracing empathy for his characters, even the distinctly dodgy ones.
But when he finishes the writing, he is left bereft. (He did have to have an author’s picture taken and after several attempts he plumped for a “passable” one taken by his teenage son, Gustavo, on his phone.) After more than three years plugging away at The Librarianist, he was reduced to trying to keep himself busy to avoid his strange, idle state of mind.
“Whenever I finish a book, I feel this restlessness and it makes me peevish and I become irritable and annoyed and I don’t know what to do with myself. And so I fill my days up with drudgery or taking care of whatever needs to be taken care of in my life. But the truth is, if I don’t have something on the go then I really don’t know how to live happily.“
He’ll miss the world of the book and the characters. “There have been certain of them – Eli Sisters, Frances Price, and Bob to a lesser degree because he’s stoic – where I find myself chatting in there. They get under your skin, especially those (first) two characters because their cadences are sort of specific and unique. And I tend to look at the world through their eyes for a period of time.“
After finishing the book, he started writing a television show – for fun. Its characters are all sort of anti-Bob characters – alpha, hyper-confident bumbling criminals. “It’s very vulgar, violent; it’s all the things that Bob was not.”
After six episodes in six months he reckons he burnt himself out, so was happy to take a break, “and anyway there’s this writer’s strike going on in Hollywood, so we’re not working on anything.”
And is he peevish now? No.
“I’ve been trying to figure out this idea for a novel I have. I don’t know who the protagonist is. I know what I want him to do, what I want him to accomplish, but I haven’t quite cracked his personality yet.“
Well, it did take him a while with Bob.
The Librarianist is published by Bloomsbury at $32.99.
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