Booklovers well know the siren song of libraries, but who would imagine a battered Winnebago belting out “I Shot the Sheriff” in the cool end of a Chicago night?
Audrey Niffenegger, of course. The author of the best-selling The Time Traveler’s Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry uses both her verbal and visual skills to conjure her new graphic novel, The Night Bookmobile. It might look like a children’s picture book at first glance, but this eerie tale of the pleasures and perils of being a lifelong reader is so not for kids.
Alexandra is walking off a fight with her boyfriend Richard when she first spots the beat-up camper belting out Bob Marley on an otherwise deserted corner. As she warily looks in, an older gentleman with bifocals and a bow tie puts down his newspaper, hands her his card — “The Night Bookmobile, The Library Robert Openshaw, Librarian” — and asks her if she’d like to see the collection. Alexandra steps into the Winnebago, which seems much larger inside, and begins looking at the shelves. She soon discovers that every title is familiar, all the childhood classics, the cookbooks, the novels by Jane Austen and the mysteries by Agatha Christie. And then she spots her diary.
This is seriously weird, and when Mr. Openshaw explains that the bookmobile contains everything that Alexandra has ever read, including cereal boxes, she becomes more perplexed. Then a bell rings to announce the library’s closing, and Mr. Openshaw herds her off the bookmobile, which glides down the street and disappears into the dawn.
Boyfriend Richard doesn’t believe her story, and she decides to keep it to herself. But she hardly forgets: “Have you ever found your heart’s desire and then lost it?”
Alexandra becomes obsessed with finding the Night Bookmobile, but it will be years before she sees it again parked outside Wrigley Field. Mr. Openshaw remains friendly yet evasive, and no, she can’t be his assistant.
So Alexandra become a real librarian, but her yearning to be reunited with her book collection continues. It is her greatest wish, and, well, we all know you should be careful what you wish for.
Niffenberger’s illustrations of Alexandra’s lonely quest are deceptively simple, almost Hopperesque. But she varies the panels’ perspectives with striking sophistication. I finished the book, and then immediately read it again, and again. Each time I saw something new in the images: Charlotte’s Web on the shelf, the beam of Alexandra’s flashlight, her black ballerina flats that look like mine. I closed it with a shiver. Oh, what a dark dream of a book.
Open Book: I bought my copy of The Night Bookmobile (Abrams) for my collection. No telling when, or if, I’ll ever find the RV playing Springsteen in the night.
On a Clear Day I Can Read Forever 
When I was up in Chicago, I was at a bookstore that had this book featured. I picked it up and started flipping through it, but it was quickly clear this book was meant to be adored slowly and carefully in my comfy chair, not in the middle of a shopping binge.