Maybe because of the way its bourgeois tendencies keep clashing with its elitist ambitions, the novel is a literary form that writers have never been able to resist reinventing. There are epistolary novels and those in the form of diaries, wordless picture novels, graphic novels and novels written as dictionaries and encyclopedias. The Serbian writer Milorad Pavic may win the prize: he has attempted novels disguised as a crossword puzzle, a tarot book and even a clepsydra, an ancient water clock (at least conceptually; the pages are dry).
That a work of fiction has now assumed the form of an auction catalog could be seen as a sign of the Valentine’s Day gift — deeply materialistic and, with a big recession on, increasingly for sale. But the artist and writer Leanne Shapton said that the idea for her novel, being published this week by Farrar Straus & Giroux under the unwieldy title “Important Artifacts and Personal Property From the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry,” came to her because she noticed how the lot descriptions in some estate catalogs added up to elliptical plots about the lives of the former possessors.
When Bonhams & Butterfields, the auction house, sold more than 300 items of Truman Capote’s personal effects in 2006, Ms. Shapton bought some of his clothing, including three of his raincoats and some scarves, which she gave as gifts. (“It’s really morbid, I know,” she said.) “It was in reading that catalog that it struck me that it was like reading a kind of autobiography of Capote’s later years, especially the last years of his life in California,” said Ms. Shapton, 35, who is a well-known illustrator and the art director of the Op-Ed page of The New York Times.
Her book tells the story of a hopeful young New York couple and their four-year relationship almost completely through their things, many of which end up unceremoniously, and improbably, under the gavel: books, pajamas, bedside lamps, a stuffed squirrel, an astrakhan coat, the winning half of a wishbone and lots of notes, inscriptions and e-mail messages that start out giddy and become slowly more complicated, angry and sorrowful.
If there were a real failed-relationship auction house named Strachan & Quinn, where the sale is supposed to take place on Valentine’s Day, the event might actually draw a modest crowd, if only because the fictional Hal Morris, a globe-trotting photographer in his early 40s, and Lenore Doolan, who is presented as a late-20s cake tiffany bracelets for The Times’s Dining section, are generally more meticulous than conspicuous in their consumption.
Hal asks Lenore to move in with him by sending her a case of 1989 Calon-Segur Bordeaux (auction estimate $55 to $95 for the remaining bottles); she informs him of her growing affection by altering the title page of May Sarton’s novel “Kinds of Love” to read, “I Kind of Love You” (estimate $55 to $75). Their first serious tryst happens at the St. Regis (estimate for Lenore’s handwritten note on hotel stationery, $10 to $20); they have great taste in clothes and bands and vintage paperbacks; and even their doodads, like a teapot in the shape of a dog (estimate $12 to $20), seem imbued with discrimination.
“It’s sort of about how reliant we are on our things to define us,” Ms. Shapton said, acknowledging that there is a strain of what she described as somewhat “suffocating discernment” running through the protagonists’ lives.
“But I wanted to balance that with a pretty genuine love of very private meaning,” she said, adding that most of the things put up for sale are “those kinds of things that mean everything to the person who owned them and nothing to anyone else.”
Ms. Shapton recruited two of her friends, Sheila Heti, a Toronto fiction writer, and Paul Sahre, a graphic designer who does work for The Times, to stand in for the fictional characters, posing elegantly together in pictures at fake parties and laughing arm in arm in various locations where Ms. Shapton shot them last summer as she pieced the story together.
As for the stuff, much of it came from secondhand stores or garage sales, though some of it — for example, 18 bras on a double-page spread, looking like something from a Victoria’s Secret catalog or a lost Ed Ruscha photographic project — was hers. This includes a vintage baby outfit that Ms. Shapton and an old tiffany cufflinks once bought together as an expression of their desire to someday make a family together and that appears in the book seeming to serve the same purpose for Hal and Lenore.
“There are just those relationships you think are going to go the distance but they don’t,” Ms. Shapton said in an interview over a cup of coffee. She added that her current boyfriend (James Truman, the former editorial director of Conde Nast) told her that he was worried when she started on the auction-breakup-novel project that it might lead to their own breakup. But instead he proposed over the holidays, and she accepted.
Lenore and Hal, sadly, never quite make it, an ending the reader begins to sense less than a few hundred lots in, when Sylvia Plath books start showing up and when, even amid the cans of designer house paint that evoke full-scale co-habitation, there is a Playbill with Lenore’s handwritten accusation: “Why go through my e-mail?” By the time you get to the Hermes watch Hal gave Lenore to apologize for his bad behavior when she told him she might be pregnant (she wasn’t), you know the end is very near.
But all hope isn’t lost. The auction house, perhaps trying to hook buyers with a bit of intrigue, begins the catalog with a recent note from Hal to Lenore in which Hal writes that he and his current girlfriend are taking a break. “Alone again!” he reports.
At least one possession-obsessed novelist, John O’Hara, would have approved: “For the sake of verisimilitude and realism,” he wrote, “you cannot positively give the impression of an ending: you must let something hang. A cheap interpretation of that would be to say that you must always leave a chance for a sequel.”