Grieving through goods

Memoir:Clocks, tools, photographs, coins, a model boat, tea towels, kitchen utensils, an electric typewriter, unfinished oil paintings, cupboards full of Pyrex, share certificates, pencils, Post-it notes, plastic bags, nine bottles of horse's blood and a box of human bones: all of this, and an awful lot more, was left to Martin Rowson when his father and stepmother died in 2004.

For decades, his father had been shoring countless fragments, "coral reefs of accumulated stuff", against the loss of his first wife and their infant son. Even half- emptied, says Rowson, the family home in suburban London "still seemed horribly full and hauntingly unchanged". Stuff is an engaging study of material and emotional detritus; it asks, literally and metaphorically, what we're meant to do with all this garbage once somebody's gone.

From the perspective of the present, notes Rowson, "the past is refracted through too many prisms and lenses picked up on the journey ever to be seen clearly". If that makes his memoir sound slightly precious, as though it mines a near-exhausted seam of familial enigma and authorial maundering, recall for a moment Rowson's other metier. As a cartoonist, he's a scabrous monster of properly Swiftian malice: the man who scrawled "F*** the Pope" in Cyrillic in the corner of one of his cartoons.

Accordingly, his reflections on grief, loss and regret (not to mention religion) are less than sentimental, and the more moving for that. Rowson's idea of a Proustian olfactory reverie is to recall, for example, that his school smelled constantly of mince, or to reflect that hospitals nowadays stink more strongly of faeces than they did when he was a boy.

HE SEEMS TO have inherited his brisk way with the details of illness and decay from his mother and father, and from the friend of his mother's whom his father later married. All three pursued medical careers, and brought home a somewhat steely attitude to mortality. After his mother's death, when he was 10 years old, the family lived as if constant doing, making, collecting and mending could somehow stave off actual emotion. Hence the drifts of stuff that still filled the house years later: Rowson's father, he writes, "concentrated on the externals . . . so at least the boundaries were intact, even if what they contained threatened, minute by minute, to unravel completely".

Stuff is a book about not talking about things; or, more precisely, not talking about the things we think we ought to be talking about. But does it matter, asks Rowson, that his father was quite unable to broach the topic of their loss? Instead, they talked about science, literature and politics, invented absurd alternative worlds and shared a cheerful contempt for authority. As with the matter of his own adoption - which he always knew about, but only investigated when he had children of his own - Rowson remains unconvinced that a culture of quietly getting on with things was entirely worse than our own era of noisy complaint. At least, he concludes as his bereft and dying stepmother is prescribed pills for her "depression", it didn't pathologise away our response to disaster.

THERE IS SOMETHING incomparably affecting about the (admittedly also oppressive) practicality with which Rowson's parents' generation addressed the matter of time's implacable advance. Living, mid-century, through a period of unprecedented industry and acquisition, they managed to sublimate a good deal of troublesome feeling into the things that surrounded them. (Rowson is excellent, for instance, on the post-war rise of DIY in Britain.) But in the process, compared to previous generations, they left behind an inordinate amount of pure crap. For those of us who've had to sift through it, it's all wrenchingly eloquent in ways our parents and grandparents could not possibly have predicted, and of which they would no doubt disapprove.

Stuff is a moving, funny and stylish account of how to hang on to the bits you really need.

Brian Dillon is an editor of Cabinet, a quarterly of art and culture. He is author of a memoir, In the Dark Room, and is working on Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives

Stuff By Martin Rowson Jonathan Cape, 326pp. £17.99