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

5.0

A really innovative book, in the form of an auction catalogue, filled with hundreds of items from a now-split couple, with item descriptions that allow the reader to piece together their meeting, their infatuation, their falling in love, and their slow recognition that they were perhaps not meant to be. Nothing about their relationship is described directly, but everything is laid bare if you’re paying attention: her eating disorder, visible in her obsessive lists of food eaten; his affairs when traveling for work, visible in his receipts for meals abroad; big fights and hurts, the evidence of which is seen in apologetic notes, and gifts that say ‘I’m sorry.’ The relationship is nostalgically pre-internet, and is filled with kind of loving back and forth - gifts and tokens of love, and markers of the years’ passing - Valentine’s Day dinners, Halloween parties, Thanksgiving dinners. The book is also a slice of early 2000s New York culturati: Robert Lowell and Richard Ford books, London Fog jackets, old sun hats, brassieres, dresses, umbrellas, snowshoes, Smythson of Bond Street day-to-a-page diaries. The book reminds you of Rachel Cusk’s Outline, which has a similar way of giving you a window into a person or a relationship without describing anything directly. It’s brilliant in its own original way, and I have read nothing quite like it.