Book World: Jennifer Howard’s ‘Clutter: An Untidy History’ takes Marie Kondo’s message a step further

Clutter: An Untidy History By Jennifer Howard

Belt. 192 pp. $26

--A growing number of popular books promise to help us declutter our homes, making the case that emptying our closets and offloading knickknacks 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 shortsightedness 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 gardenvariety 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 premieres, 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.

Howard devotes a chapter early in the book to the mysterious causes of hoarding, a clinical, sometimes lethal, disorder that afflicts between 2% and 6% of the population, perhaps including her mother. Howard’s central concern is not the pathological extreme, however, but “our own vexed relationships with things,” which is to say, the ordinary chaos of tchotchkes on your mantelpiece, the box of moth-eaten baby clothes that hasn’t been opened since 1982, the tote bag you take from the conference because it’s free, the tacky souvenir refrigerator magnet you’re tempted to buy on vacation.

Howard would tell you to enjoy your vacation but resist that refrigerator magnet - and while you’re at it, quit taking so many pictures - you’ll never look at most of them again, and the ensuing digital clutter will ultimately weigh on your mind, as it does on hers.