The Caretaker

July 15, 2020
A brief novel cluttered with words about a small museum cluttered with objects. 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.

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July 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.