Released in 2020 in the United States, the Guardian is the first novel by Doon Arbus, 76, eldest daughter of American photographer Diane Arbus (1923-1971). We would be lying if we said that this filiation is not what first attracts the customer, especially since the front of the volume promises a dive into the “house-museum” of a collector whose legacy is maintained by a guardian “in the fiercest and most savage sense of the word”. Doon Arbus being his mother’s executor, it does not take more for the now well-informed reader to assume the metaphorical text and rejoice in advance of an Oedipal analysis: the book is open – and, one would say , the trap closed. Here we are captives, a bit like Hansel and Gretel lured by sweets in the forest this winter. Flee ? Not that easy. The rules are set by the eponymous character like a pact: “Well, you’re going to be allowed to leave, but to get out of here you’ll have to leave something behind. […] Getting out should cost at least as much as getting in, don’t you think? So let’s go, who starts? Make me an offer.”
A glassware placed at the top of the staircase explodes
They are nine to visit the former residence of the philosopher, chemist and all-round collector Charles A. Morgan. Twenty-five years earlier, the “Guardian” House («caretaker» in English, both janitor and home help) applied to preserve the legacy of this shadowy man who leaves behind a widow and a heap of heterogeneous objects. Since then, twice a day, the host leads the curious in small groups through the corridors of the foundation. “He is here only for the dead to live. It has become a consuming task. His work is never done.” The routine is compromised for the first time when a glassware placed at the top of the stairs and “resembling a leafy cabbage about twelve centimeters in diameter” explode as if it had “exhausted the limited time allotted to him on Earth”. Later – we come back to this – the caretaker without a story greets the public in Dr. Morgan’s three-piece suit, the one “in which he died”. Would the guide turn out to be one of “those tragic madmen that one encounters in sensational reports” ? To get out and get out of it – that’s the game – everyone will have to give up something of themselves, offload it.
Clever, this Guardian prompt and chic gives the change: we think of Shirley Jackson or Henry James more than the illustrious mother of the author. Certainly for the disturbing strangeness at home, but also because from these pages a writing emerges. Gnarled sentences, images, comparisons: here, we unpack a shroud layer after layer “like dismembering an origami bird” and the hair appears “colorless as a butterfly’s wing”. Doon Arbus, also one of the feathers of the new journalism in the 1960s, could not dream of a better intermediary than Christian Garcin for his translation.