DEAD WEIGHT
New book rages against clutter the departed leave for us to clean up
Clutter: An Untidy History Jennifer Howard
Belt
A growing number of popular books promise to help us declutter our homes, making the case that emptying our closets and off-loading knick-knacks that don't spark joy will improve our spirits and ultimately our lives. In her stern and wide-ranging new manifesto, Clutter: An Untidy History, journalist Jennifer Howard takes the anti-clutter message a step further. Howard argues that decluttering is not just a personally liberating ritual, but a moral imperative, a duty we owe both to our children and to the planet. “As boomers age, move into smaller places, or die, their gen X and millennial relatives are called on to step up and clean up after them,” Howard writes.
To leave behind a mountain of belongings for others to dismantle, Howard writes, “replicates, on a personal level, the short-sightedness and abnegation of responsibility that have handed us climate change. It's too much trouble to sort out all this stuff; dealing with it just reminds us that we're going to die anyway and that none of it matters. Let the kids deal with it.
Howard was a kid who had to deal with it, and she didn't enjoy the experience. The scenario that inspired this book will be familiar to many readers, even if they haven't responded with Howard's bitterness: When her elderly mother moved to a care facility, Howard was left to empty her “fully loaded” house.
In part because her mother had begun suffering from dementia, Howard encountered a scene of appalling squalor: “The kitchen is a health inspector's nightmare. Larvae squirm through the sludge that covers the dirty dishes filling the sink. Mouse droppings dot the countertops like sprinkles.”
But there was plenty of garden-variety clutter to sift through, as well. Howard empties closets that “overflow with Amalfi and Ferragamo shoes, formal gowns from four decades of artistic galas and premières, and pantsuits for the 1980s and '90s career woman, with boxy jackets and silk scarves and gold jewelry big enough to be noticed but not large enough to be garish.” Every surface is littered with objects: “pill bottles, nail scissors, binder clips, chopsticks, pens, pencils, coupons, pocket change, random keys, sticks of chewing gum.”
Faced with her mother's accumulated possessions, Howard was deeply resentful and, for better and worse, that resentment drives this book. Whether you can relate will probably dictate how you feel about it. I am all too capable of resentment, but while the year I spent cleaning out my late mother's house was full of intense emotions, resentment was never one of them. This is not to discount Howard's experience, just to say that Clutter is grounded in a sentiment that may be less relatable than she thinks.
How did our lives get so cluttered? Howard traces our “collective clutter agita” back to the Victorians, who favoured parlours overstuffed with the curios generated by a burgeoning industrial economy. The Victorians, she asserts, “helped establish expectations that persist today about what a well-appointed home looks like.”
This is a curious claim given the design and decor publications of recent decades have featured airy, minimalist spaces with only the scantiest, most artful clutter, certainly no unsightly children's toys or television screens.
She's more convincing when she moves on to the rise of catalogue shopping in the 19th century, the precursor to the likes of Amazon that allow us to satisfy our appetite for consumer goods instantaneously.
While I'm not about to get rid of my mother's wedding china, I'll think twice before clicking “buy now” after reading this book. My children agree.
The kitchen is a health inspector's nightmare. Larvae squirm through the sludge that covers the dirty dishes filling the sink.