The Caretaker
“Doon Arbus’s beautiful, moving, original novel…creates a fictional world that reflects, illuminates, and reveals the ‘real’ world we live in…[A] wryly funny, subversively philosophical book.”
Francine Prose, New York Times bestselling author
Following the death of a renowned and eccentric collector—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. This peculiar institution (the Society for the Preservation of the Legacy of Dr. Charles Alexander Morgan) is dedicated to the annihilation of hierarchy. A priceless Dürer and other peerless antiquities commune happily with a toothbrush, a plastic coffee cup lid, and the rest of the ignored, the discarded, the undervalued and the valueless.
The caretaker, a restless devotee of Dr. Morgan’s work, believes he has landed the job of his dreams. But as the years go by and the lines of identity begin to blur, the caretaker learns he must pay a terrible price to inhabit Morgan’s home, his history, and the remnants of his life.
The Caretaker is a profound, probing novel with the momentum and tension of a thriller and is, in the words of Publishers Weekly, an “unnerving feat of contemporary postmodernism.”
Praise