The Caretaker
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A lush, disorienting novel, The Caretaker takes no prisoners as it explores the perils of devotion and the potentially lethal charisma of things
Following the death of a renowned and eccentric collector—the author of Stuff, a seminal philosophical work on the art of accumulation—the fate of the privately endowed museum he cherished falls to a peripatetic stranger who had been his fervent admirer. In his new role as caretaker of The Society for the Preservation of the Legacy of Dr. Charles Morgan, this restive man, in service to an absent master, at last finds his calling. The peculiar institution over which he presides is dedicated to the annihilation of hierarchy: peerless antiquities commune happily with the ignored, the discarded, the undervalued and the valueless. What transpires as the caretaker assumes dominion over this reliquary of voiceless objects and over its visitors is told in a manner at once obsessive and matter-of-fact, and in language both cocooning and expansive. A wry and haunting tale, The Caretaker, like the interplanetary crystal that is one of the museum’s treasures, is rare, glistening, and of a compacted inwardness.
Kafka or Shirley Jackson may come to mind, and The Caretaker may conjure up various genres—parables, ghost stories, locked-room mysteries—but Doon Arbus draws her phosphorescent water from no other writer’s well.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Arbus's sly debut novel (after Diane Arbus: A Chronology, a coauthored collection of her mother's diary entries) explores the insular world of the late Dr. Charles Alexander Morgan collector, chemist, philosopher, philanthropist, and all-around eccentric whose legacy, consisting of hundreds of items ranging from seashells and coat hangers to a portrait by Albrecht D rer and Morgan's seminal masterpiece entitled simply Stuff, is overseen by a devoted and unnamed caretaker. The labyrinthine Morgan Foundation is a repository of strange and unusual objects, through which the slavishly devoted caretaker leads curious tourists and would-be specialists. When the crown of Morgan's collection a black plinth forged by a crashed meteorite is damaged by a guest and the caretaker's lectures begin to take on a devious, increasingly unbalanced subtext, the reader begins to wonder whether the Foundation's visitors really are the caretaker's charges or are they his prisoners? Arbus brilliantly describes the caretaker's distorted sense of the museum as a living, breathing organism ("the whole place has come alive again and has found its voice and is chattering away in its native language to the solitary listener"), and flirts just enough with gothic tropes to dramatize his existential dilemma. Taking cues from tales by Kafka and Robert Walser, Arbus pulls off an unnerving feat of contemporary postmodernism.
