Review: Rent Collector

Rent Collector by Camron Wright
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I chose to read “The Rent Collector” because from the description it reminded me of Katherine Boo’s “Behind the Beautiful Forevers,” which I enjoyed quite a lot. Both books follow people living in and working in garbage in Asian countries. Both books illustrate the kindness and industry of the poor, and both show that people can behave meanly as well. Boo’s book is considered non-fiction, though it read like a fiction book. “The Rent Collector” is fiction, but based on a documentary. So the books seem very related on the surface. In terms of writing style and intent, “The Rent Collector” felt a more saccharine story, along the lines of a Mitch Albom or Nicholas Sparks book. It felt more popular and American, for example the characters repeatedly say that they live in a “dump”. That seems too judgmental and American a word for these people to describe their homes. There were also observations, such as a passage about wearing Western t-shirts, that seemed like something an American writer would notice, but the characters wouldn’t have noticed. You could see “The Rent Collector” becoming a Hallmark movie. Bad things happen, but there is a little growth in the characters. It felt like a story, whereas BtBF felt like a lesson wrapped in a story, a good kind of sermon. This sounds over the top, but in perspective, reading BtBF changed me, while reading “The Rent Collector” provided me some entertainment.

Another aspect of this book that was interesting is the author’s back story. The author describes in an afterward how he came to write the book. His son created a documentary on people who lived in a dump in Cambodia. The author took stills from the documentary, which followed specific people around in the dump, and built his fictional story on these photos. He included a selection of the photos in the back of the book, with the character names and descriptions that he came up with. Talk about art imitating life. Given the real-world basis for the story, I feel I learned a little while reading a story of another culture.


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