The Times (UK)
Reviewed May 22, 2008 by Caroline White
When we can buy the musings of the misunderstood glamour model Jordan, the scribblings of the former drug and sex addict Russell Brand, or the Government-shaking recollections of an ex-Prime Minister's wife, a reader may wonder why they should opt for a memoir by Scott Douglas, a dour 30-year-old, about his years spent working in a public library.
The library is in Anaheim, California, home of Disneyland, but that is where the glamorous associations end. His colleagues are bureaucratic dullards and their customers are the elderly, the mentally ill, and the poor - so poor that the librarians fabricate excuses to distribute free food paid for out of the library's budget.
But this drab setting is where Douglas experiences a pivotal event in American library history, the advent of the internet. There's certainly a visceral significance about the printed word meeting the web, perhaps its greatest threat, on its own turf.
Douglas's fellow librarians, who really do have “large-framed glasses, granny hairdos and uptight frowns”, enter the digital age uneasily. He skilfully describes the awe, confusion and feeling of being under an unstoppable siege, familiar to anyone who has had the internet thrust upon them. Douglas, who writes a blog (upon which the book is loosely based) for the website of the American literary magazine McSweeney's, feels compelled to help others navigate the “digital fortress” his library has become.
Indeed, Douglas revels in his ideal of a librarian as a sort of bookish Mary Poppins, beloved of the grateful community - ostensibly to explain why the able graduate has chosen such a dusty profession. But his fantasy jars with the real librarians he meets, and the failure of the library authorities, staff and customers to live up to his expectations has clearly embittered his own interactions. At points, the reader must tolerate an adolescent-sounding Douglas whinge misanthropically about the misanthropy of others.
But he redeems the mood with lucid insights into the broken lives of the library's visitors, including “the shoe guy”, a mentally ill man who repeatedly tries (once successfully) to steal Douglas's shoes, and a woman who thinks that the CIA is stealing her documents via the internet and who is genuinely being followed by two military men.
These are not the shiny, happy Californians who people our cinema screens and magazines, but they are funny, illuminating and give Douglas's recollections a rawness with which the airbrushed memories of society's winners cannot compete.
When we can buy the musings of the misunderstood glamour model Jordan, the scribblings of the former drug and sex addict Russell Brand, or the Government-shaking recollections of an ex-Prime Minister's wife, a reader may wonder why they should opt for a memoir by Scott Douglas, a dour 30-year-old, about his years spent working in a public library.
The library is in Anaheim, California, home of Disneyland, but that is where the glamorous associations end. His colleagues are bureaucratic dullards and their customers are the elderly, the mentally ill, and the poor - so poor that the librarians fabricate excuses to distribute free food paid for out of the library's budget.
But this drab setting is where Douglas experiences a pivotal event in American library history, the advent of the internet. There's certainly a visceral significance about the printed word meeting the web, perhaps its greatest threat, on its own turf.
Douglas's fellow librarians, who really do have “large-framed glasses, granny hairdos and uptight frowns”, enter the digital age uneasily. He skilfully describes the awe, confusion and feeling of being under an unstoppable siege, familiar to anyone who has had the internet thrust upon them. Douglas, who writes a blog (upon which the book is loosely based) for the website of the American literary magazine McSweeney's, feels compelled to help others navigate the “digital fortress” his library has become.
Indeed, Douglas revels in his ideal of a librarian as a sort of bookish Mary Poppins, beloved of the grateful community - ostensibly to explain why the able graduate has chosen such a dusty profession. But his fantasy jars with the real librarians he meets, and the failure of the library authorities, staff and customers to live up to his expectations has clearly embittered his own interactions. At points, the reader must tolerate an adolescent-sounding Douglas whinge misanthropically about the misanthropy of others.
But he redeems the mood with lucid insights into the broken lives of the library's visitors, including “the shoe guy”, a mentally ill man who repeatedly tries (once successfully) to steal Douglas's shoes, and a woman who thinks that the CIA is stealing her documents via the internet and who is genuinely being followed by two military men.
These are not the shiny, happy Californians who people our cinema screens and magazines, but they are funny, illuminating and give Douglas's recollections a rawness with which the airbrushed memories of society's winners cannot compete.
