If, like me, you're one of those people who has a meticulously arranged, categorized, and alphabetized list of favorites on your web browser, now would be the time to hide it. You're about to be told why you're neurotic, obsessive-compulsive, closed-minded, uncreative, conventional, uninspired, and possibly even fascist. You get the impression that you can ignore the little disclaimers to the effect of "sometimes mess CAN be dysfunctional" that pop up along the way: they're just for show. Mess, and implicitly the Right Brainer who thrives in it, are the focus of Abrahamson and Freedman's new religion, and this book is its sacred text.
One of the first things the writers do (after vilifying Americans for the amount of money they spend on professional organizers) is to characterize "mess" into about a million different categories. I called this chapter "the list chapter." From "Types of Messy and Neat People" to "Ways People Can Be Messy," the lists were fun, if not a little overwhelming back-to-back as they were. I did start to notice my academic autopilot switching on; for anyone who hasn't been a student for awhile, this is when your brain decides something you're reading requires memorization for a future test and immediately starts classifying and organizing all of it. I found myself repeating the list terms back to myself as though this were required material, forgetting, for a moment, that it was for fun.
While the slightly textbookish feel of a few of the chapters grated a bit, it certainly didn't ruin the book, and even the overly-academic lists had their funny moments. I laughed out loud when they talked about people who treat their piles of clutter "like nuclear waste--something that requires a massive, costly cleanup and until then must not be trifled with." The sentiment was nearly word-for-word what I thought about my pantry in my former dorm room. Still, the lists can be tedious, but if you're comfortable skipping over certain parts of a book (I'm half OCD, so I read every word), you can just skip over them, no harm done. There are plenty of good parts to skip to.
Also, if you're a trivia junkie, you'll come away with some interesting facts: Did you know, for example, that background noise is artificially added to cell phone conversations? That's just a sampling, but there are a few "REALLY?!?" moments that make it worthwhile, too. And, keeping in step with the times, they employ a whole range of pop science to support their pro-mess stances, some of which are interesting and some of which are a stretch.
As a fairly organized (but not hyper-organized) person, I picked up and appreciated the irony of the stories of mess-obsessed people in the modern world. One hilarious story involved a woman in New York City who called in a "professional organizer" (if this book were a novel, this would be its antagonist) to try to "help" her with her perceived mess. The writers walk you through a pathetic story about how much humiliation a little bit of clutter has been causing her. The story is witty and worthwhile, and the message resonates throughout the book: IT'S ONLY CLUTTER. It doesn't make you a bad person, a stupid person, or even necessarily a disorganized person. Basically, CLUTTER HAPPENS, especially when you have kids, pets, and a full-time job. And as long as it isn't impairing your ability to function, it's probably fine. They support this general message through a comforting quote by Einstein, the Icon of Smart People: "If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what then, is an empty desk?" That's right, the junk wizards of the world are saying in unison, you said it, Einstein!
The scope of the book is huge, ranging from "messy homes" to "messy thinking" and from clutter in business organization to clutter in politics. At times, it can be somewhat overwhelming, but the prose is breezy and the frequent human-interest anecdotes kept me engaged. I enjoyed the story about the founder of The New England Mobile Book Fair (AKA Strymish's) in Boston, where inventory is arranged nominally by publisher but effectively randomly and where the chief operating officer today operates off of a staircase landing in the back of the store. Indeed, highly-ordered organizations are another object of the writers' wrath. They dissect another common sense notion: Bureaucracies are inefficient. "IBM," they point out, "adopted a management structure that took the form of an eight-dimensional matrix, whose working presumably would have been perfectly transparent to anyone conversant in string theory." These sorts of quotes are what really move the book along and kept me reading. I was suprised at how much of this book seemed to be a business book. There were places where it read more like a "corporate leadership" guide than a layman's beach read. Not to say that the chapters on business organization weren't interesting, but you had to have some patience to appreciate them, something Americans are running short on.
Ultimately, the last few chapters provide a good closing, focusing on achieving an "optimal" level of mess. They acknowledge that there is such a thing as "pathological" mess (they stray into some ADHD talk here), but generally focus on how these forms of mess can be put to good use.
At the end, I agreed with them: Society does have a bias in favor of organization and neatness, even when that preference is illogical. A Perfect Mess should be on the wish list for managers, parents, and government officials. While the offhand association of organized people and Nazis may have been a little offensive at times, the writers had a point: People and organizations might just run a little better (and be a little less anxious) if they stop worrying and enjoy their clutter--after all, most people in the Third World would take that problem any day.
CAUTIOUSLY RECOMMENDED
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