Love and Stuff

Love always creates a lot of junk. In those first heady days of a
relationship, gifts seem to come from everywhere at once: handwritten
notes, little stuffed animals, whimsical objects from boutiques and
vending machines. And at the end of a relationship, you turn your back
on all that now-useless shit as part of the process of recovery and
renewal. An essential healing procedure of any painful breakup, after
the Ritual Returning of the Stuff, is the stowing (or throwing) away of
the tokens of affection. Half of the items in your standard thrift
store are probably detritus from failed romantic adventures (the other
half are from dead people). The story that any one of those abandoned
artifacts has to tell is incomplete, of course, but meaningful
nonetheless.

In her new book, Important Artifacts and Personal Property from
the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books,
Street Fashion, and Jewelry, Leanne Shapton has devised a way to
tell the story of a relationship solely through the items purchased and
employed over the course of that relationship. Ingeniously, the story
is told in the form of an auction catalog (for a fictional auction
taking place, melodramatically, on Valentine’s Day 2009). Each page is
primarily taken up by black-and-white photographs, and the text is
restricted to an auction-style description of the items. One page, for
example, has a large photo of a gray T-shirt that reads “Property of
McGill Athletics.” Shunted off to the side, almost incidentally, the
text reads:

LOT 1143
A McGill University Athletics T-shirt
A gray cotton McGill University Athletics T-shirt, emblazoned with
varsity logo. Much wear and fading. Label inside reads “Russell
Athletics.” Size XL.
$10–15
Included are two photographs. One snapshot of Doolan with her
computer in bed, wearing the T-shirt. One snapshot of Morris on a
staircase, wearing the T-shirt. Both 6 x 4 in. The couple referred to
the T-shirt as “the sex T-shirt,” as wearing it indicated a readiness
for sex. The shirt originally belonged to Jared Bristow, an
ex-boyfriend of Doolan’s from high school.

It would take a novelist dozens of pages to set up something so
minor and yet so telling as “the sex T-shirt,” but Shapton here has
done that work in a subscript note to some advertising text. Every page
could give birth to a dozen tightly worded literary short stories, but
instead, Shapton briskly moves along to the next lot.

Here is some of what we learn about the couple: Doolan writes a
column about cakes and baked goods for the New York Times (Shapton is an art director at the NYT). Morris is a
photographer who travels the world for his work. Morris is 13 years
older than Doolan. He likes to keep his distance. She gets
angry—even occasionally throws things—when she feels shut
out of his life. They both spend lots of money on antiques and vintage
collectibles. She thinks he drinks too much. He thinks she doesn’t like
traveling enough. They met at a Halloween party; she was Lizzie Borden,
he was Harry Houdini. Like every love affair, the ending is stitched
ornately in the couple’s beginning.

Viewing the relationship through their stuff does have its downside.
A reader can easily become disgusted with Doolan and Morris for being
spend-happy urbanites: The vintage silver-plated cake server engraved
with “Bravo Buttertart” (“Buttertart”—occasionally
“Butterbutt”‘—is Morris’s early nickname for Doolan) is a
bit much. But who doesn’t occasionally go over the top for the
one they love? Other items are completely practical—18 of
Doolan’s bras are up for auction. And we can easily see ourselves in
some of the other items, especially (speaking for myself) the books:
Somewhere in the four years that Important Artifacts… spans,
Morris reads The Master and Margarita and Doolan reads Lives
of Girls and Women.

There’s a basic thrill here that is something akin to poking around
in someone else’s house when they’re not home, but the pleasure exceeds
simple voyeurism. It’s not so much a book that is written as curated:
Imagining the work that Shapton must have put into finding, say, the
perfect travel alarm clock for her characters is nearly as touching as
the fictional search that brought Doolan to the same clock. And like
many romantic searches, it turns out to have been done in vain: The
listing for the clock reads, “Doolan insisted that the clock remain on
New York time. Morris took the clock on two trips, but complained that
it was too heavy.” The clock’s story ends the same way every object’s
story in Important Artifacts… ends: It winds up in an auction
catalog, waiting for someone to find it, and think that it is perfect,
and take it home with them, and love it.