The Keeper of Lost Things

During her interview for a position with Bomber’s publishing firm, Eunice and Bomber initially bond over their mutual love of films, particularly The Great Escape, the epic war adventure about American and British soldiers scheming to escape from a German POW camp entirely constructed to thwart such escapes. Although the film was hailed for its gritty realism, the film itself and movies generally, guilty pleasures for these two lonely misfits, suggest the novel’s wider interest in the lure of strategic escape and the need to find solace apart from a world that too often wounds, disappoints, and even terrifies.

Anthony, for instance, uses his trust fund and his spare income as a writer to finance Padua, for him a perfect escape, a quiet space set in the middle of the chaos and noise of London. The world terrorized him 40 years earlier when Therese, on a routine errand just days before they were to be married, was struck dead in the street by a car. The home becomes for him a sanctuary where for 40 years he creates his own immersive world of lost things without relying on the companionship and complications of others. Hermetically sealed in a perfect faux-world that cannot hurt him, surprise him, or threaten him, Anthony further escapes into the soft prison of his own imagination, spinning stories about the objects he finds in the streets and in the park.  

Bomber, as a gay man in the closet and thus uneasily living a lie, finds grateful escape from the heavy burden of that lie in the splendid worlds of movies. Eunice, in her thirties and just beginning to understand the implications of a life she will spend alone, seeks similar escape in movies, finding in the tidy plots with their bold characters, their manic suspense, their easy-to-define conflicts, their neat lessons, and their tidy resolutions everything her own life lacks.

Laura’s escapism is far darker. When Laura applies to work for Anthony, her life is a mess. She long ago traded away the promise of attending university and being a writer for the easy stability of marriage. Her marriage to an abusive serial philanderer imploded. She is still reeling from the trauma of a miscarriage. At 35, Laura is surviving only through the escape of anti-depressants. Afloat in that un-real world, she first sees the opportunity to work for Anthony as a chance to heal, to slip off into the labyrinthine rooms of the sprawling Padua, and to attend to a set of rigidly set chores as a way to leave behind the frustrations, anxieties, and disappointments of her life. Under Anthony’s direction, and with the help of Sunshine and Freddy, Laura emerges at the end of the novel ready to engage with the real-time world, knowing now that heartaches and joys make life both wonderful and terrible and, in the end, worth living. 

The Keeper of Lost Things as a novel tells the story of its own genesis. In the last page, Laura settles down to her computer at last to be the writer she dreamed of being when she was a child. She types the first line of her novel. It is the first line of the novel we are finishing. In that way, The Keeper of Lost Things is a kind of novel called a künstlerroman, or a story about the making of an artist.

At its joyous heart, Hogan’s novel audaciously celebrates the rich energy of storytelling. The novel’s main characters are voracious readers, publishers, writers, or would-be writers. Hogan’s novel itself is a nested narrative, a novel with many stories embedded into its trunk plot. There are the two parallel stories of Eunice and Laura, strangers to each other who only meet in the closing 20 pages. Anthony himself is a writer of some note. Years earlier he published under the title Lost Things a collection of stories inspired by some of the things he found in London’s streets. They were happy stories about love and childhood. After initial critical success, Anthony found little enthusiasm for his stories as they became darker and more disturbing.

In addition, Bomber shares the increasingly bizarre plots of his sister’s wildly popular trashy novels (her most successful novel is titled Harriet Hotter and the Gobstopper Phone). Then, at regular intervals in Hogan’s novel, italicized stories develop items in Anthony’s study—a jigsaw puzzle piece, a lady’s glove, a hair clip—into character studies. They are stories of love and loss, loneliness and relationships, telling of the tragedies and joys of ordinary life. The stories are set apart from the ongoing narrative of Laura and her coming to terms with the proprietorship of Padua. There is no authorial explanation for who wrote the stories, but they match the memories that Laura hears when she later meets those who lost the objects. It is most likely then that these are the stories Laura writes when, now in her fifties, she returns at last to her childhood love of storytelling. That makes the novel itself a metafictional account of how it came to be written.

The novel celebrates storytelling. Even Eunice, who alone appears uninterested in storytelling, shares with Laura the improbable story of her rescue of Bomber’s ashes. Laura calls her new friend a “natural storyteller,” stunned that she had never “written anything herself” (266). Through storytelling, characters tap an internal energy that endows the real-time world with wonder and gives the triumphs and defeats of everyday life purpose. Stories shape communities of the lonely, among readers who identify and sympathize with stories of made-up people doing made-up things, and ultimately between reader and writer, strangers who meet through the vehicle of words shaped into narrative.