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. 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. 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. But there was plenty of garden-variety clutter to sift through.

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.