The Guest v. The Librarianist
The 2024 Tournament of Books, presented by Field Notes, is an annual battle royale among 16 of the best novels of the previous year.
MARCH 26 • SEMIFINALS
The Guest
v. The Librarianist
Judged by Dan Sheehan
Dan Sheehan (he/him) is a writer and editor from Dublin, Ireland. His debut novel, Restless Souls, was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and named one of Entertainment Weekly’s 10 Great Debuts of 2018. His writing has appeared in The Irish Times, Oprah.com, GQ, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. He is the editor-in-chief of Book Marks at Literary Hub, and lives in western Wyoming with his wife, daughter, and dog. Known connections to this year’s contenders: “I read and did a short blurb for Chain-Gang All-Stars for a Lit Hub preview some months back, but that’s about it.” / dan-sheehan.net
There is something delightfully freeing about being asked to compare the merits of two books that have absolutely nothing in common with one another. Ideologically, stylistically, structurally, thematically, you’d be hard-pressed to find two more different Major American Novels released last year than Emma Cline’s The Guest and (I know he’s Canadian) Patrick deWitt’s The Librarianist. Is that an exaggeration? Almost certainly. They both, after all, focus on somewhat spectral protagonists attempting to jettison the heavy armor of their own self-imposed isolation, albeit for wildly different reasons. But indulge me; I can’t get the image of The Librarianist’s mild-mannered (and, poor fella, inevitably cuckolded) septuagenarian librarian, Bob, and The Guest’s quietly destructive Gen Z escort, Alex, being snowed-in together at an all-night diner out of my head. Oh, the road trip they’d embark upon once the plows arrived.
The Guest is a queasy, corrosive, backstory-free mood piece so sodden with dread and discomfort, so spiritually poisoned from the outset, that I found myself wincing, literally wincing, at the beginning of each of Alex’s fraught “social” encounters. The Librarianist, on the other hand, is a bittersweet-but-buoyant nesting doll of a tale, full of walk-on eccentrics lobbing wry asides at our everyman protagonist, Bob Comet, as we take a leisurely backstroke through the formative events of his life.
What then is the reason for all these burned bridges?
One of the aspects of The Guest that I suspect some readers will find frustrating (but which I found strangely compelling) is its refusal to provide us with any meaningful backstory, let alone what you might call a “master wound,” for its deeply damaged protagonist. Alex, at the tender age of 22, has, through scrupulous beautification rituals and careful observance of New York’s wealthy middle-aged men, made herself a viable candidate for long-term patronage. Yet, for all her efforts, for all her study and hyper-vigilance and willingness to contort and compress her personality into whatever shape upper-crust sugar daddy Simon desires (which is to say, a small, smooth, sexually pliant shape. “That was the point of Alex—to offer up no friction whatsoever”), her precarity is such that by the time she begins her six-day couch-surfing odyssey through the East End of Long Island, she barely has a working phone to her name.
What then is the reason for all these burned bridges? From where does the uncontrollable impulse to self-immolate, to push the Ming vase from the wobbly plinth come? We never really find out. Only her most recent fuckups are alluded to. But the agony of watching Alex try to reconcile her nature with the imperatives of her quest is exquisite. Like Cheever’s titular swimmer, Alex turns to both the bottle and the glinting water of strangers’ pools for the fleeting respite of liquid oblivion—but she, and we, know the end of summer is nigh. The Guest’s observational prowess is scalpel-sharp, and one of the many painful pleasures of this novel is how Alex trains her piercing gaze on the constitutional guilelessness of the wealthy. “There was no need to rush—” Alex thinks, after a woman returns to the bathroom of a private club to collect the bag that Alex had, moments previous, been rifling through—“it didn’t seem to occur to the woman that the contents of her bag weren’t intact.”
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Whatever Alex is, she’s certainly not dull, which is more than can be said for poor Bob Comet, a sweet, meek dullard hiding (reasonably contentedly, it must be said) in the stacks of a Portland library for the better part of 50 years as humanity’s true comets blaze past. (Bob’s beloved wife Connie, a roman candle Bob was never really equipped to hold, hitched a ride on one of them). For the first 50 odd pages of The Librarianist, you could be forgiven for wondering if the gentle, dare I say “twee” absurdity of this fastidious bibliophile interacting with the ornery residents of a ramshackle nursing home is as much pathos as we’re going to get—but I would urge you to give it a minute.
The Librarianist plops us down on the shoulder of an unassuming soul—a sort of anti-protagonist protagonist—as the garrulous misfits in his orbit attempt to dragoon him into joining them in the real world, and the results are consistently delightful. Yes, the action, when it arrives, is madcap (drunken dinner parties, minor brawls, V.E. Day revels) and the dialogue is as quirkily humorous as you’d expect from a deWitt novel, but beyond those surface pleasures there’s also a marrow-deep sorrow to proceedings that snuck up on me and lingered. At several points throughout the bouncy narrative, I found myself plunged into the same state of melancholic yearning that afflicts Bob himself.
I fretted over this one, reader, I don’t mind telling you.
About halfway through the second section it occurred to me that, in his passivity, Bob functions as a magnet for the expansive musings of others. Their sexual histories and bizarre preoccupations, their faded dreams and unrequited loves, their manic stream-of-consciousness assessments of a changing world: All of it swirls around Bob—whether he’s 71, 25, or 11 years old—in a tornado of human feeling that leaves him awestruck and a little envious, but into which he can never quite bring himself to step.
It was the old story of an isolated child finding solace in the school library while his peers shrieked their joys and agonies up from the playground.
Now, to the verdict. I fretted over this one, reader, I don’t mind telling you. Hand to God, I would recommend that you spend your hard-earned American dollars on both novels. They’re worth it. There can, however, only be one winner and, by a gray nose hair, I’m giving it to Bob and The Librarianist. Ultimately, despite the undeniable power of The Guest’s nightmare beach read, The Librarianist’s ability to distill real substance from the cozily sentimental feels like the (marginally) greater achievement.
Advancing:
The Librarianist
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
Kevin Guilfoile: Judge Sheehan does a wonderful job of drilling down to the essences of these protagonists. We never get Alex’s origin story, just a mounting sense of unease as we see her interact with (and manipulate) the oblivious residents of Long Island, and when we get brief glimpses of the wreckage she has caused in the past, we realize she is very bad news. She is in some ways an existentialist character, but in another way The Guest is analogous to a horror movie where you never quite get a good look at the monster, and you are more anxious for it.
John Warner: I think this aspect of the novel is something I particularly appreciated about The Guest, the refusal to give her wounds a specific point of origin. She is what she is and the novel is really just designed to take us on the ride of her life. Judge Sheehan describes “wincing” at what we see Alex about to get herself into and that’s exactly correct. I think what is particularly interesting is that the novel does this in a way that engenders fascination without having to prey on our sympathy or scorn as an engine for that fascination. I’m actually wondering if that’s more rare in our contemporary literary firmament than I think it is. Every judgment that’s discussed The Guest has really upped it in my esteem.
Kevin: Bob Comet is a seemingly uninteresting man who, we are surprised to learn, led a pretty interesting life and somehow came out the other end mostly unaltered by it. He is a most unlikely character—an essentially unbiased narrator of his own story. We like him. He is, as Lorrie Moore once put it, good company, and we feel his heartbreaks and disappointments while he introduces us to the other, quirkier characters who have been in his orbit.
John: Yes, Bob is a totally different creature of the world from Alex and it is our sympathy for him that ties us to the story. Like all of deWitt’s novels, the action and events and characters are some small number of degrees moved from reality—it almost reminds me of like a Roald Dahl approach to adult stories—but everything in the novel is convincing on its own terms. The Librarianist should be insufferably corny or twee, but it isn’t. Judge Sheehan is right that it wrings substance from what could be merely sentimental or saccharin. That is a feat worthy of recognition.
Kevin: I am running Zombie ballots through the tabulator for the final time, John, and The Guest does not quite have the tallies to get it into survival mode. This means our Zombies are set. Tomorrow, National Book Award winner Blackouts will meet braineater The Bee Sting. Then on Thursday, The Librarianist will face a down-but-not-yet-out The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store.
And one of their authors will soon be parenting a live, probably cantankerous Rooster.
Today’s mascot
Nominated by Judith, please meet today’s mascot, Nash, a 12-year old golden retriever who lives in LA not far from the beach. Nash likes everyone on sight and if he really, really likes you, he will turn around and sit on your foot so you can easily pet his head and back, and rub his chest.
Nash was a little saddened that many of his favorite books did not move forward from this year’s long list as he was interested in the judges’ takes on them. He had hoped that Big Swiss would be about cheese, and thought White Cat, Black Dog might be a morality tale. Nash’s gentle feedback for the ToB executive suite is that the Tournament would not be made worse if more books featuring dogs were to be selected.