Inside Voices

Patrick deWitt’s The Librarianist is, as the novel’s title suggests, about a librarian. As the obscure word “librarianist” further ­suggests, working in a library can be more than just a job. It can be something of an art, a calling.

This fun, messy novel — a major departure for deWitt in both setting and subject matter — works backwards in time, from the opening section of 2006, when the retired librarian Bob Comet has become something of a hermit, to the dissolution of his marriage years before, and into deepest childhood, all in a picaresque, scattershot attempt to answer a central question: “Why read at all? Why does anybody do it in the first place? Why do I?”

Although this is the third time deWitt has set a novel in the American West (both Ablutions and The Sisters Brothers take place in...