07/27/2020
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 Dürer 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. (Sept.)
"Arbus takes the narrative into a realm where hallucination, perhaps, a trace of the supernatural, just maybe, and obsession, undoubtedly, are the only keys to the riddle that she, no mean trickster, has conjured up. And it is made even more disorienting by Arbus’s distinctive voice, calm, wry, deadpan amid absurdity, and yet capable of lyricism at unexpected moments."
2020-07-01
The unnamed protagonist of Arbus’ debut novel has the charge of a house museum devoted to the possessions and legacy of Charles A. Morgan, a chemist, philosopher, collector, and the author of the influential Stuff , a book about—well, you can guess. Although this is her first novel, Arbus has written several nonfiction books, mostly about the work of her mother, the photographer Diane Arbus, whose estate she became responsible for after the photographer’s death when Doon was in her 20s. The story unfolds slowly, without much incident: The future caretaker reads a newspaper account of Morgan’s death and writes to the collector’s widow asking for a job. At her urging, the board of the Morgan Foundation interviews and reluctantly hires him to run the museum. In an incident the caretaker calls “the incident,” a visitor breaks a fragile object; gathering the pieces, he hurts his hand. Years pass, board members retire and are replaced, and the neighborhood gentrifies around the museum. The caretaker continues to lead tours. He rants at visitors, performs rituals, and steals objects for obscure, melancholy reasons. All of this unfurls in long sentences laden with unilluminating details and trailing unnecessary clauses. Possibly this is deliberate: Arbus may be making a point about the accretion of meaning through the accumulation of apparently meaningless fragments, and she may be drawing a parallel to the museum itself and its collections. But while it’s easy to imagine some other writer—Dickens, Melville, Isak Dinesen, Nicholson Baker—spinning this premise into thrilling fiction, Arbus’ caretaker and his museum never assemble the details into a moving story.
A depressed protagonist prevents the novel from achieving depth by keeping fellow characters and readers at a distance.
"This wryly funny, subversively philosophical book is brief—yet deep enough to contain humans and objects, love and death, memory and amnesia, oblivion and survival. It generates its own musical score: a phrase of Satie, a few notes of the Well-Tempered Clavier, and then the Beethoven sonata."
"The book opens and, one might say, the trap is set. We are captives, almost like Hansel and Gretel, lured on by this sweet treat of the winter literary season. To escape? Easier said than done….Shirley Jackson or Henry James come to mind…certainly due to the disquieting strangeness of the place, but also because from these pages a prose style emerges: gnarled sentences, images, similes. They unfurl here layer after layer “like someone dismembering an origami bird.’"
Libération - Thomas Stelandre
"A devoted admirer of a famous collector becomes the obsessive caretaker of his collection after his death….The caretaker…guides the museum visitors on a dialectic journey, immersing them, and us along with them, in his dizzying obsession with things. Doon Arbus…captures here the essence of the eccentric…through the lens of a disturbingly sinuous tale, which is not without a hint of mischievous irony."
LH Le Magazine - Sean Rose
"Doon Arbus’s tale unfolds in an elegant, sometimes clever language that confounds time and creates an unsettling Gothic atmosphere….Throughout this fable, with disquieting humor, [she] invites us to ponder the often overrated weight of the past, the absurd importance accorded material things, and the dangers of overinterpretation. "
Le Tribune de Genève - Boris Senff
"In this cabinet of curiosities, a tragicomic drama unfolds in an increasingly ominous atmosphere. For the visitors and the reader alike, the tension grows. "
Le Figaro Littéraire - Isabelle Spaak
"In her first work of fiction…[Doon Arbus] recounts the story of a man without qualities who decides to devote his life to the implementation of an artist-collector’s last wishes….[Her] imagination is a true cabinet of curiosities. "
"An enigmatic and necessary book."
"For all its wit, The Caretaker is a quite unsettling study of obsession and madness that gradually creeps up on you and makes you complicit with the caretaker at the expense of his more bloodless antagonists because he at least has passion and the courage of his convictions. When I came to the end—which, like all perfect endings, is both surprising and inevitable—and was liberated from this closed, claustrophobic world, I wasn’t quite ready for it. The novel has a grip and once it lets you go, an imprint remains which leaves you with a slightly different gaze on the world around you."
"The last page of this strange and beautiful meditation on time, loss and the erosion of memory ends with ‘the exquisite neutrality of silence.’ But Doon Arbus’ sentences…their magnitude, their precision, the cadence of their fall resonate in us for a long time and touch us the way we love to touch the things to which our soul attaches itself."
Le Monde des Livres - Camille Laurens
"Arbus takes the narrative into a realm where hallucination, perhaps, a trace of the supernatural, just maybe, and obsession, undoubtedly, are the only keys to the riddle that she, no mean trickster, has conjured up. And it is made even more disorienting by Arbus’s distinctive voice, calm, wry, deadpan amid absurdity, and yet capable of lyricism at unexpected moments."
New Criterion - Andrew Stuttaford
"Dense, visual, and true, this short book speaks volumes about the theater of the mind, and how the ensuing comedic drama we call life unfolds inside and outside our control."
"A spell-binding, intricate and haunting tale of a world-renowned philosopher’s house museum filled with his collection of objects, and the mysterious man who becomes the museum’s caretaker."
Think About It - Ulrich Baer
"There’s a ringing prescience to the book’s philosophy that feels precisely contemporary. Curation is an obligation that’s crept up on us. Isolation and ceaseless data have made caretakers of us all, shut-in keepers of playlists and timelines, quarantined arrangers of meaningless objects. As such, The Caretaker acts as an analogue telling of our virtual predicament. "
Cardiff Review - James Butler-Gruett
"No one writes like this anymore. Each sentence is perfect and inevitable, written in a voice—both intimate and formal—that soothes and seduces. The book itself is a ghost, a carrier of stories, a text that holds and gives and shimmers with the lives of Things. Their “charisma.” When I finished the last page, I felt as though every word had been written just for me. I suspect many readers will experience that same glorious, unshakable connection to what is truly a masterpiece."
Alan Cumming is a natural fit for the meticulous narrative of Doon Arbus. His voice matches the erudite, cerebral drama perfectly. Listeners are eased into the world of philosopher Charles Morgan, author of a book entitled STUFF, who dies and leaves behind a museum of his many collected items. The board hires an eccentric caretaker who presides over the museum and its visitors with increasingly concerning behavior—which culminates in "the incident." Cumming does not disappoint: Listeners may find themselves lost among the museum's artifacts, but Cumming embodies the spirit of the caretaker and centers us with his unfailing confidence. Matching the energy of the story, Cumming gives another stellar performance. S.P.C. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
NOVEMBER 2020 - AudioFile
