Book World: 'The Secret Lives of Hoarders'

Anyone who seriously collects anything — whether books, vintage clothing, pulp magazines, vinyl records, old comics, classical CDs, manual typewriters or Golden Age movies on tape and DVD — at least occasionally thinks about hoarding. If, like me, you regularly visit thrift shops and used-book stores and yard sales in search of, well, all the items just mentioned, you sometimes think, while driving home with a trunk full of “treasures”: Has this gotten out of control? Do I have a problem?

Just asking the question suggests that “yes” is the right answer.

Still, I figure that I’m only at Stage One of Matt Paxton’s “hoarding scale.” I’ve got clutter and I’ve got a basement full of “stuff,” but my house isn’t structurally damaged, there aren’t narrow passageways between piled up newspapers and trash, and the upstairs rooms are neat and tidy (excepting, of course, the bedroom of my youngest, at-home-in-the-summer son). But, as one reads “The Secret Lives of Hoarders,” it’s hard not to hear a small voice whispering, “There but for the grace of God . . . . ”

Paxton runs Clutter Cleaner , a Richmond-based company that specializes in total-house cleanup. In the more extreme cases described in this engagingly written book, that means the removal of mountains of garbage and the bodies of dead pets, the excavation of almost geological strata of trash, the occasional discovery of long-lost valuables, and, in many cases, a referral to appropriate counseling for the homeowner.

The most famous hoarders in American history are the Collyer brothers , whose story has inspired both articles and novels, most recently E.L. Doctorow’s “Homer & Langley.” Living in a New York mansion stuffed with newspapers and debris, one sibling was accidentally crushed to death by falling junk, and the other, unable to move on his own, gradually starved. One or two of the people in “The Secret Lives of Hoarders” make the Collyers look like rank amateurs.

“Rank” is the mot juste too. Time and again, Paxton mentions the stench — from urine, feces and decaying food — that he encounters on a job. Take the case of Margaret, who “had been hoarding so many years that her possessions had started to decompose at the bottom of her five-foot piles. Everything in her double-wide trailer home was either broken, rotting, or chewed or peed on by the fifty or so dogs that had free run of the place. There was extensive water damage from broken pipes, with walls and ceilings split and falling down in spots. The house stank, it was hot, and the air was thick with dust. Cobwebs waved from the ceiling and flies buzzed at all the windows.

Stateless Warrior's Blog: 5K Of YOUR American Son's Are No More….

Stateless Person, Songwriter, Author, Musician, Vocalist, Web Developer, Graphic Designer, Former General Contractor, Business Entrepreneur who was maimed for life on 3.09.2003 by corrupt DEA Agents in the City of Sacramento, State of California. The cover-up is what this Blog partially addresses. . Well, that and Federal american Government's "Genetic" stupidity.... Spent the last two decades in the USA as a Stateless person without any legal rights. Consequently Maimed for Life by the corrupt Drug Enforcement Agents from New York's Eastern District. Following, published Maimed in the USA book and recorded his first Contemporary Christian Album titled Mighty Lord... Subsequently attacked on a daily basis with respiratory toxing by federal US (DEA) enforcement and their HAND-PICKED American Citizen cronies. .

American son, a novel

American son, a portrait of John F. Kennedy, Jr

American Son, My Story

The Average American Son

Native American Son, The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe