The Irish Times
  Reviewed June 21, 2008 by Thomas McCarthy

LIBRARIES:SCOTT DOUGLAS has been chronicling the life of a librarian in Anaheim Public Library for the last five years. Anaheim is a quintessential Californian place; a city that's grown from a population of 15,000 to over 300,000 since the Disney Corporation sited one of its theme parks there in 1955.

The world that Douglas describes has a curiously disconnected feel to it, a kind of free-wheeling, distressed and vagrant community on the edge. This is a public library alright, but it is California, outside the painted gates of a fake place; an America of malls and loners, a daily round of readers out of Bukowski and Ambrose Pierce.

Here, where the Anaheim River flows in a procession of rusted shopping trolleys and wet garbage to the ocean, there are few consolations and fewer shelters: but the Anaheim Public Library is one of them. Scott Douglas has been thrown into this mix, and he tries to make sense of it all in this book with an impish, quixotic sense of humour that is as quiet as the daily show and as nervous and insecure.

I have to admit I didn't like this book when I read it first. Now I've read it again and find the humour more entertaining; less irritating. Douglas has a particularly Californian humour, self-deprecating yet fundamentally waspish and superior. He means well all the time, but he doesn't have a heart of gold.

Yet his antenna is always raised, listening, taking in the unhappy facts of his neighbourhood: "Motel kids are something in every big city. It's hard for them not to break your heart. They're the ones who never seem to have clean faces, whose clothes are always faded, dirty, and often ripped, who ask for spare change because they lost their money when in reality they had no money at all". His account of waiting outside the library with two unsupervised children after 9pm is probably the best description of his library's neighbourhood and a reminder, as he himself observes, of why communities need libraries. One of the key journeys in this book is that growth of understanding in Douglas, an almost crushing realisation that while he is trained professionally to lead customers to information, in reality he is part of the insertion of order and refuge into a broken place. Once the library doors open, all of the neighbourhood rushes in, hoovering up whatever moves, talks, reads and educates.

Fresh into and out of Library School, Douglas progresses from the bibliographical concerns of Dewey to the social engineering of Andrew Carnegie. A public library, while it is designed as a cultural and educational tool, is in fact a very complex social intervention: with more cards than Visa and more outlets than McDonald's, the world's public library services are an essential social force in millions of lives. In a cold world, libraries are a trusting space, an area of protected transactions. Douglas's sense of the library's history and purpose grows as he encounters this procession of life.

The story of his library's popcorn machine, offering free popcorn, and of his library's annual distribution of vouchers for a nearby burger chain as part of a reading incentive programme, offers us an insight into the desperation at work beyond the security of the bookshelves and computer terminals. Patrons, he discovers, do not live by books or bytes alone.

This is why the title of this book is unfortunate. It should be No Quiet Please. It is nearly 27 years since I had a quiet day in my own library. I remember that day well, July 29th, 1981, a day when the Rebel City of Cork stayed at home to watch the marriage of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer. There was an eerie quiet in the place; even the most eccentric and homeless Cork readers became loyalists for a day. There are no days like that in Douglas's book; but this book is only the first chapter in what will be a long career. The idea that a modern neighbourhood library should be quiet is so outdated that it is never discussed in any company of librarians nowadays. But it is an image that persists, an image so brilliantly turned upside-down by Ann Seidl's masterful feature-length film The Hollywood Librarian.

I must warn the sensitive borrower that Scott Douglas can be extremely cranky. In the post-9/11 days he must have been one of the few people in America who disliked firemen: "I thought the firemen were a bunch of arrogant jerks and not very neighbourly in any way. I hated them . . .".

Then again, he has other dislikes: "I'll be honest. I'm not a fan of the handicapped." He also has a problem with the elderly, and with teenagers: "A teen walked out of the library with his girlfriend, looked straight at me, and said, 'Faggot'. I had never seen the kid before. That, in a nutshell, sums up what I think of teens". But these irritated asides are part of the raw nature of this narrative, a narrative that began as a blog for the website McSweeney's. His honesty is truly painful, but it reveals his library life in that golden State of sunshine and dreams.

As Philip Larkin noted so often in his poems, what desk-work offers all of us is an endless succession of days, a procession of characters - and a few rats that come with the popcorn machine and the reading incentives.

In 330 pages, (written to spite his writing instructor at Fullerton Community College), Scott Douglas tells it like it is across the sun-baked tracks from Disneyland.