My Brother's Keeper

Fictional treatment of the Collyer brothers, epic NYC hoarders. The trash-packed brownstone is a metaphor for the unconscious, where the brothers, the id and the superego of a single character, bury everything important in their complicated emotional lives. This concept emerges after a leisurely opening full of period charm but little preparation for the central fact of the story, other than establishing the emotional damage done to the brothers by their wicked witch of a grandmother, owner of the house. Then a shared (of course) romance with an opera singer ensues, giving Davenport scope to dilate on a subject (opera) clearly more congenial to her than OCD. Davenport's mother was an opera singer and Davenport was a regular commentator show more on the Met radio broadcasts. There is a lengthy idyllic interlude on the shores of Lake Como. Only the last sixty pages of the book will be of real interest to hoarding enthusiasts, although the Freudian interpretation underlying the story is apparent from the beginning. This book, well-written at the sentence level, would have benefitted greatly from more aggressive editing. My copy (457 pages) could have been reduced by a hundred pages to good effect.. show less

3845. My Brother's Keeper, by Marcia Davenport (11 Jan) Somewhat to my surprise, I read this 1954 book well-known in its day, telling of two brothers who became recluses and turned their home into a fortress full of junk. Much of it is incredible though one realizes it was inspired by the 1947 events surrounding the Collyer brothers in New York. And for that matter I can recall having occasion to be in really incredible places swamped by accumulated stuff. This was an attention-holding book, and made me want to read a true account of the Collyer brothers. Apparently such a book exists, though I have not read it: Ghost Story: The Collyer Brothers, by Jay Maeder, published in 1947, based on the extended newspaper coverage of the show more excavation carried out in the New York mansion where they lived. [I was not able to find the book mentioned but on Mar 29, 2014, I read Ghosty Men, by Franz Lidz, which tells the story but intersperses it with the story of theauthor's uncles who had some of the same tendencies as the Collyer brothrs. i still would like to read the Maeder book--which is not even cited in the Lidz book--which shows that the Lidz book did not try very hard to give a documentaary account of the event,} show less

My absolute favorite book.