The Keeper of Lost Things

Anthony Peardew has spent much of his life pining for a woman he lost 40 years earlier, shuttered alone in a rambling mansion in the heart of a bustling city, and dedicated to the lonely life of a writer with few readers. His life is shaped around a single grand regret: He lost the childhood medallion that his fiancée entrusted to him days before her death. Indeed, his name is a corruption of the French word perdu, which mean lost. Driven by the loss of the medallion, he has spent 40 years gathering things others have lost, meticulously cataloguing these objects in the unlikely event he might be able to return them to their owners. He has lived a dusty life strung with cobwebs.

As Laura comes to see, however, Anthony lives not in the past but in the wondrous expectation of his reunion with Therese. His is a love so profound that death holds no power. His death in the garden is a sweet and easy moment in the story: He goes to Therese’s rose garden and quietly eases off into what he knows will be his reunion with the only woman he ever loved. Anthony does not waste his life; rather, in that love he finds sustenance, emotional strength, and purpose. Indeed, he gently teaches Laura to reclaim the power and comfort of love.

Through the vehicle of his short stories, Anthony allows his imagination to connect him to the lost owners of the lost things. He finds comfort in that binding. It is not that that he does not see the loneliness of his life. His publisher remarks that over the years his stories grow darker and more disturbing as Peardew, even as his collection of things swells, grapples with the hard reality of losing what cannot be recovered. Laura teaches him the reward of engaging life in the moment. In his powerful bond to the past and his expectation of his approaching reunion with Therese after death, Peardew lost the present. When Laura moves in as his assistant and he senses a profound empathy in her and ultimately entrusts his home and his collection to her care, he opens up to her. That openness marks his own reclamation as a character. He does not merely die Therese’s tragic lover. He dies Laura’s friend as well. 

Of the novels’ quartet of primary characters, Charles Brockley, who calls himself Bomber, lives the fullest life in the moment. Eccentric and quirky, swaggering and flamboyant, he is a self-employed publisher of wonderfully obscure writers. Far from the mass market pressures of big publishing houses, he embraces the raw creativity and untutored imaginative energy of the struggling writers whose unpublished works are perpetually stacked on his desk, among them a collection by a young Anthony Peardew. Bomber disdains sales and success. Erudite and self-possessed, he is never at a loss for a clever quip or sharp retort. For him, stories and movies are far from escapes; the crazy energy of the movies he so loves enhances his life. Their plots, their characters, and the emotions explored by his favorite movies help him live more fully. His conversation is threaded with references to the movies and books he loves.

As a closet gay man in the 1970s and the 1980s, Bomber lives without access to the most ordinary sort of relationships. Although it is hinted Bomber found some solace and satisfaction in the nightlife of gay-friendly Brighton a safe 50 miles from London, he lives alone with his identity kept a secret. Only with the advent of AIDS (and the impact of the powerful film Philadelphia) does Bomber’s mother finally tell her only son how little his sexual orientation matters to her and how much he loves him.

Ironically, the character most engaged by life in the moment struggles for years against the increasing fog of Alzheimer’s. Bomber’s suicide, his great escape, raises thorny questions about whether such a gesture is heroic or cowardly. In death, Bomber, like McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, slips away from confinement, both free and self-defined. Like McMurphy, Bomber in death emerges almost reluctantly as the novel’s agent of redemption. It is only through his death, specifically the cookie tin filled with his ashes, that Eunice and Laura meet, an encounter that, in turn, secures eternal rest for the ghosts of Anthony and Therese and inspires Laura to return to writing.