Important Artifacts and Personal Property

 
 
Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry
by Leanne Shapton
Sarah Crichton Books

2009

 

 

This is the good stuff. Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry is a novel in the form of an auction catalog, and it is a masterpiece.

 
What Shapton is doing with this book is what every museum exhibit is trying to do - tell a story through objects - and she does it so, so well. This is a masterclass in material culture. In fairness, Shapton got to invent everything she needed to tell her story, while actual curators are limited by what actually exists in their museum's collection, by the space available to display it, and by human endurance, since their audiences typically view the entire exhibition at one go, and while standing, while I got to lounge around enjoying Shapton's precise prose and well-crafted images at my leisure.

 
Shapton's book is the size and shape of a catalog, and each page has numbered black-and-white photographs alongside numbered paragraphs that describe the object photographed, and sometimes give a little extra context. Some wholly textual objects are described and the relevant text reproduced, but with no accompanying photo. The formatting is perfect. Each entry has a lot number, a bolded name for the lot, a physical description including condition, and a suggested price range for bidding. Her commitment to this gimmick is total.

 
And the gimmick itself is an absolutely perfect fit for the subject matter. The story we watch unfold is two people meeting at a mutual friend's Halloween party, starting to date, deepening their relationship, moving in together, then breaking up after maybe 3½ years. The auction date is the Valentine's day after  they ran into each other one last time, a few years after the breakup. The nostalgic, scab-picking impulse to revisit every little trinket and memento of your time together with someone after it's over is represented perfectly by the auction catalog. 

 
And Shapton chose her objects well. I'm in the middle of a move, and going through some of my own boxes of mementos from college and grad school, finding old photos and letters from friends when we used to send each other those instead of their electronic equivalents. The kinds of things you keep, not just to torture yourself but to remember fondly too, are exactly the kinds of things Shapton uses in this book.

 
(Also for anyone who's worried, my efforts during previous moves have largely weeded out any psychic hazards. Now I'm mostly left with photos of people I liked, flyers from events I'm proud I was involved with, letters I was happy to receive. If I want to be sad, I can do it without needing a reminder. I'm saving treasures, not curses or traps.)

 
We see photos of the couple, party invitations, presents they gave each other, notes they wrote each other or to themselves about the relationship, their toiletry bags with all the contents laid out and itemized from their first trip together, books they read (almost always with a note tucked inside,) clothes from significant occasions alongside photos of them wearing them, excerpts from emails, examples of their personal hobbies and professional work, and more.

 
When they first meet, Lenore is in her mid-20s, and Harold is in his late-30s. She's a food writer for the NYT who gets her own column about cakes during the course of their relationship. Harold is a photographer, I think freelance, and he travels a lot, going off around the world on assignment. You believe their love, but they're never able to overcome the problems that appear early on. Instead those just get worse. 

 

When Harold travels for work, Lenore misses him while he enjoys the excitement of the trip. When they fight, she's fiery and he's distant, sometimes literally walking away, which echoes their dynamic when he travels. And fundamentally, Lenore fears that Harold doesn't take her or her work seriously, that he looks down on her or feels superior. The eventual breakup is sad but not surprising.

 
When it first came out, this was optioned to become a movie, which never got made, which is kind of too bad, because I hope the filmmaker would've leaned in to the experimental aspect of the format. I highly recommend this one, because it's so well assembled, so well told.