Doon Arbus is a writer. She was born in New York City and never really left. The author of six nonfiction books, she made her debut as a novelist with The Caretaker . She is also a freelance journalist.

Arbus’s writing is uniformly tight and focused, rendered with a light, amusing touch. The Jamesian quality of her prose extends to the book’s pleasantly gothic atmosphere, reminiscent of The Turn of the Screw...The Caretaker is an enigmatic and necessary book, especially for those conflicted about the physical detritus accumulated over the course of a life.

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

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.

Doon Arbus’s beautiful, moving, original novel does just what we want a novel to do: It creates a fictional world that reflects, illuminates and reveals the ‘real’ world we live in. 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. - Francine Prose

Doon Arbus' 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 theatre of the mind, and how the ensuing comedic drama we call life unfolds inside and outside our control. A marvelous new voice. - Hilton Als