Canadian author and screenwriter Patrick deWitt has a penchant for weirdos and non-heroes.
His books include Man Booker-shortlisted The Sisters Brothers, a Western featuring sibling assassins; Ablutions, narrated by an alcoholic bartender; deviant fairytale Undermajordomo Minor, and French Exit, in which a mother and son flee to Paris with their cat whose body her late husband's soul has transmogrified.
Photo: Lee Palmer
His latest, The Librarianist, follows introverted bookworm Bob Comet as he makes a late-life bid to connect.
Bob is in his early 70s, deWitt tells Kim Hill.
“He's a retired librarian, he's not dissatisfied with his life, he's very isolated and doesn't have much of a social calendar.
“He's not unhappy in spite of this, but there is something missing and we sort of want to find out why he is the man he is, how he came to be this this solitary creature.
“So, the book is just the unravelling of that story, sort of pulling away at the thread from the start and seeing where it takes us. And it takes us to his early years as a librarian in the 1950s, and then further back into the 1940s, when he ran away from home, towards the final days of the Second World War.”
Bob likes to read, deWitt says.
“He devotes most of his spare time to reading, which doesn't make for fireworks, particularly in terms of a narrative. But I think the stories that lead up to, again, the full-scope portrait of the man are fascinating, or they are to me, I hope that they are to the reader as well.”
Bob’s friend in the novel, Ethan, is a wilder character, he says.
“The Ethan-Bob dichotomy is a fascinating one for me in that I can relate to both of those characters.
“Ethan is a bit of adventuresome, caddish type. And then Bob is very much the introvert and wants to stay home and read sort of a person. Both of those make sense to me, both of those ways of life makes sense to me.”
deWitt was a bookish child himself, he says.
“I did take to reading in a way that I think was abnormal as a young person, I read in a sort of traditional sense when I was, you know, 9,10, 11 - once I hit puberty I started reading beatnik books and things like that.
“It made sense to me in a way that I think was, looking back, probably a little bit strange, certainly not the norm among my peer group.”
His more caddish side came out during his time bar-tending, when he wrote Ablutions.
“Gluttonous behaviour, yeah, I think I did get it out of my system so much as one can, my life is pretty quiet these days. But there's always room for some adventure, right? I mean, you've got to make some space for that.”
His adventure of choice these days is travelling and meeting people.
“After three and a half years sitting in my room alone working on this new book, it's really nice to get up and go.”
The success of The Sisters Brothers came as something of a surprise to him, he says.
“I didn't really know what to make of it. It wasn't something I'd anticipated, I had low expectations for that book, not that I think it's a shabby book, I just didn't think that it would reach as many people as it did.”
He believes people took to the character of Eli Sisters in the book and that may have contributed to its popularity.
“I think people primarily enjoyed spending time with Eli Sisters. And it was a first-person voice, that was quite a close friendship for the reader.
“And he is sympathetic and empathetic, and he does have a couple of funny lines.
“And then also, I think it's a fascinating story, the gold rush in the United States of America in the middle 1850s was a strange place.
“So, I think it was a bunch of different things working in my favour. But again, I didn't anticipate this at all.”
His novel Ablutions came about through lucky chance, deWitt says.
“I worked on the book when I was working at the bar. It's not meant to be autofiction, but there was a good bit of that bar in the book, I'm afraid, and certainly my behaviour.
“Anyway, the book was in a rough draft state and I didn't know what to do next. And I had no friends interested in literature, or who were writers, not really. And I needed an agent, I recognised that, but it seemed very alien to me, how does one acquire one of these magical beings?
“And a man came through the bar one night, who I knew had written a couple of scripts that have been turned into films, a gentleman named D.V DeVincentis and I knew he had an agent or a manager or somebody, one of those magical people in his corner.
“So, without him knowing what I was doing, I began to give him drink after drink for free, and he's a good man anyway, I would have done this, just because he's good company.”
Eventually he gave DeVincentis the manuscript to read.
“And he did, and he liked it. And he introduced me to the man who introduced me to the man that became my agent.
"And this took all took place over weeks or months, even after I'd left the bar. But it was lucky, but it was also alcohol. Alcohol and luck coming together, it's a powerful force.”
He barely drinks these days, he says.
“It's been years but I had one drink the other night. There was a musician in Portland I love named Michael Hurley.
“And he was playing at this little dinky bar and all my friends were there. It was a beautiful summer day, and I thought I'd love a gin. And I got up and I had a gin and ginger beer with lime and it was delicious.”
He is no longer bedevilled by “demonic gluttonousness", he says.
“I'm just calmer generally. And my spirit is calmer, like I'm not as anxious. The root of most addiction I find is sort of a desire to deaden unpleasant emotions and most of those emotions have lifted, so I probably could casually drink but I do find that I'm happier and I get more done and I'm healthier, obviously. Yeah, without the drink, perhaps it's wiser to steer clear.”
He’s currently working on an uncommissioned TV series about a crime spree on a remote Canadian island and a novel about a Vietnam draft dodger. The TV series is on hold while the writers’ strike is on, he says.
“Once the strike is lifted, we'll see what happens with the TV show. I've got quite a few, I think five or six episodes, done of that hour-long episodes. So there's a good bit ready to share when it comes time to share with whoever cares.”
