A Review of Kate Durbin’s Hoarders
by Eleanor Stern, Rain Taxi fall 2021
A voice knits together the fifteen chapters of Kate Durbin’s novel-in-prose-poems, Hoarders. The voice flits like a camera’s gaze between otherwise disparate chapters, each narrated by a hoarding person or couple, mimicking the episodic style of the reality TV show the title alludes to. The voice sometimes juts in to add italicized context and commentary to the characters, and sometimes monologues simply by listing objects in the subject’s home, as if panning slowly over them. If the book is mimicking a reality show, it’s the camera itself—the narrator’s voice—that is the most fascinating and elusive here.
Sometimes the effect of this narrator is a sardonic aside, other times a clarifying metaphor. Noah and Allie, the focus of chapter seven, hoard books, which become so copious they literally cannot sleep together. Noah defends this, but the camera’s voice slyly undermines him, continuing his sentence without any fanfare except a switch out of italics: “Books don’t bite The Science of Jurassic Park and the Lost World, Dracula.” When Greg, the focus of chapter fourteen, recounts the car crash that prompted him to start hoarding, the voice offers and illustration drawn from the trash in his house: “Threw me up in the air 80 to 120 feet mini trampoline.” When the voice interrupts a generalization from Shelley, who hoards Barbies, with a specific image, it withers the confessional platitudes of reality TV: “My mother lives with us and she can’t even walk down the hallway because there’s so much tiny Barbie shoes.”
Linda hoards food. In a jewel-like micro-paragraph typical of Hoarders, she describes the twists of her abusive marriage that set her on her mold-encrusted, mouse-infested path. “I love you, I love you, I love you, move out, I can’t stand you,” she intones. The voice seamlessly continues, “rotting apple, apple, apple; something in the peanut butter jar that isn’t peanut butter.” Here the voice is cryptic and searching. It echoes Linda, building trust in her account. Yet it’s well-placed vagueness suggests that the mechanisms linking trauma to hoarding are, to an extent, irrational and thus obscure.
Hoarders as a whole thrives off the tension between the irrationality of hoarding and the neat pop-psychology explanations characters provide; but the pop psychology explanations aren’t wholly dismissed. It’s easy to believe that Linda’s ex-husband, in pushing her away from every creative outlet except cooking, left her with both a loyalty to food and a resentful drive to subvert this most housewifely of talents. Cathy, unable to provide a dream home for her kids, hoards symbols of domesticity—wedding dresses and Thomas Kinkaide puzzles. Ronnie’s fear of oblivion drives him to fill multiple houses with shiny kitsch.
Yet for the roving, penetrating voice, and maybe for the thousands who watch the reality show Hoarders, it’s the sheer extremeness and disproportionality of the addiction that fascinates. Though the voice takes an empathetic rather than exploitative gaze, Durbin doesn’t shy away from shocking. In fact, the voice seems determined to up the ante on disturbing detail, ensuring that we can’t explain away what we see. No reference to past abuse or fear of death can entirely illuminate the roots of these characters obsessions, which cause them to destroy their homes, torment their families, and sometimes harm the very things they compulsively hoard.
Alice, for instance, loves cats so much that she imprisons them. Her house becomes a cross between a breeding ground and a horrific feline mass grave. The voice points out a “cat squatting and shitting on the countertop” and takes us inside a freezer full of “several cats frozen together in a tangle of feet and fur.” The voice doesn’t try to stitch up Alice’s accidental cruelty with a neat explanation. It ditches both the exulting disgust and narrativing sentimentality of reality TV, letting Alice’s love and selfishness live side-by-side in resplendent irrationality. “I can’t even say anymore that I love animals because I’ve treated them so horrible,” Alice says, but the voice picks up where she leaves off to show us “Alice stirring wet food on a paper plate with her fingers then feeding it to one of the tiniest kittens by prying it’s mouth open and gently placing the food on it's small, pink tongue.”