The Night Bookmobile by Audrey Niffenegger
Jonathan Cape, $49.99
First, because it has to be done, let's get our definitions sorted. The cover of this slim volume bills it as a graphic novel. To me, that generally implies a close kinship to comics: sequential panels, speech bubbles, pictures assuming a great deal of the descriptive or expository burden. There are quite a few speech bubbles here, sure enough, and many of the pages are indeed broken up into panels.
But many other pages are not, and most of the story is told through the text. If you took the pictures out and just ran the text, adding "I said" or "he said" after the speech bubbles, you'd lose atmosphere, but that's all you'd lose. This is a text-dependent book with pictures. A picture book, in other words, though not one for children.
Complicating caveat: Audrey Niffenegger has two previous works you could describe as picture books for grown-ups, the surreal, lovely The Three Incestuous Sisters and the far more surreal, rather less lovely The Adventuress. She describes both of these as "visual novels", to differentiate them from graphic novels. This book does not resemble those in any way whatsoever.
The preceding explanation is about as complicated and involved as explanations of Niffenegger books usually are. Whether it's the fantastically interwoven timelines of The Time Traveller's Wife, the multiple sets of sister-impersonating identical twins in Her Fearful Symmetry, or the question of exactly what happens in The Three Incestuous Sisters and The Adventuress, Niffenegger books are not things you describe to the uninitiated without taking a deep breath first. Except for this one.
Once you get past the question of exactly what sort of book it is, this story has the clarity and simplicity which lie at the heart of Niffenegger's best work, without any complicating structural trickery. A woman goes out walking late at night, and encounters a strange little man driving a truck, which turns out to be a mobile library. Every book in the library is one she's read: it's the library of her own personal reading history, and the little man is her personal librarian.
At dawn she has to go home. For years, she walks the streets at night, trying to find the library again. It turns up from time to time, always with additional shelves, filled with the books she's read in the interim.
She becomes more and more obsessed with it. A dangerous obsession? A rewarding one? A beautiful, haunting story about the capacity of our inner lives to both enrich and overpower us.
David Larsen is an Auckland reviewer.
