Doon Arbus’s debut novel is a kind of mystery—about who we become, what the absent leave us with, and why. Dense, visual, and true, this short book speaks volumes about the theater of the mind, and how the ensuing comedic drama we call life unfolds inside and outside our control. A marvelous new voice.

This wryly funny, subversively philosophical book is brief—yet deep enough to contain humans and objects, love and death, memory and amnesia, oblivion and survival. It generates its own musical score: a phrase of Satie, a few notes of the Well-Tempered Clavier, and then the Beethoven sonata.

The Caretaker is that very rare thing—a perfect book and unlike any other. Its world is small, compact and beautifully rendered. Reading it is in the best of ways like time travel, slightly fantastical and totally believable.

Arbus embraces a slightly awkward distance from her subjects, enough to leave the distinction between tragedy and comedy unsettled….Sprinkled with dry wit and flashes of intriguing observation, The Caretaker, for all its odd obsessions and unexpectedly dark ending, is a strangely charming little book.

Doon Arbus’s tale unfolds in an elegant, sometimes clever language that confounds time and creates an unsettling Gothic atmosphere….Throughout this fable, with disquieting humor, [she] invites us to ponder the often overrated weight of the past, the absurd importance accorded material things, and the dangers of overinterpretation.

A devoted admirer of a famous collector becomes the obsessive caretaker of his collection after his death….The caretaker…guides the museum visitors on a dialectic journey, immersing them, and us along with them, in his dizzying obsession with things. Doon Arbus…captures here the essence of the eccentric…through the lens of a disturbingly sinuous tale, which is not without a hint of mischievous irony.

The book opens and, one might say, the trap is set. We are captives, almost like Hansel and Gretel, lured on by this sweet treat of the winter literary season. To escape? Easier said than done….Shirley Jackson or Henry James come to mind…certainly due to the disquieting strangeness of the place, but also because from these pages a prose style emerges: gnarled sentences, images, similes. They unfurl here layer after layer “like someone dismembering an origami bird.’

The last page of this strange and beautiful meditation on time, loss, and the erosion of memory ends with “the exquisite neutrality of silence.” But Doon Arbus’ sentences…their magnitude, their precision, the cadence of their fall resonate in us for a long time and touch us the way we love to touch the things to which our soul is attached.

No one writes like this anymore. Each sentence is perfect and inevitable, written in a voice—both intimate and formal—that soothes and seduces. The book itself is a ghost, a carrier of stories, a text that holds and gives and shimmers with the lives of Things. Their “charisma.” When I finished the last page, I felt as though every word had been written just for me. I suspect many readers will experience that same glorious, unshakable connection to what is truly a masterpiece.

A spell-binding, intricate and haunting tale of a world-renowned philosopher’s house museum filled with his collection of objects, and the mysterious man who becomes the museum’s caretaker.

There’s a ringing prescience to the book’s philosophy that feels precisely contemporary. Curation is an obligation that’s crept up on us. Isolation and ceaseless data have made caretakers of us all, shut-in keepers of playlists and timelines, quarantined arrangers of meaningless objects. As such, The Caretaker acts as an analogue telling of a virtual predicament.

Arbus takes the narrative into a realm where hallucination, perhaps, a trace of the supernatural, just maybe, and obsession, undoubtedly, are the only keys to the riddle that she, no mean trickster, has conjured up. And it is made even more disorienting by Arbus’s distinctive voice, calm, wry, deadpan amid absurdity, and yet capable of lyricism at unexpected moments.

Taking cues from tales by Kafka and Robert Walser, Arbus pulls off an unnerving feat of contemporary postmodernism. A sly debut novel.

For all its wit, The Caretaker is a quite unsettling study of obsession and madness that gradually creeps up on you and makes you complicit with the caretaker at the expense of his more bloodless antagonists because he at least has passion and the courage of his convictions. When I came to the end—which, like all perfect endings, is both surprising and inevitable—and was liberated from this closed, claustrophobic world, I wasn’t quite ready for it. The novel has a grip and once it lets you go, an imprint remains which leaves you with a slightly different gaze on the world around you.