A T-shirt, a loaned book with a note in it, a coffee mug; we probably all have objects in our lives that have outlived the relationship that brought them to us. Keeping them, even the ones we don’t mean to keep, is a romantic impulse. Collecting the knickknacks together, cataloguing and then auctioning them off, then, might carry a sense of frosty calculation. Or at least that seems to be the idea underlying Important Artifacts…, a fictional auction catalogue of items shared by – or symbolic of – the former relationship between Shapton’s invented New York couple, Lenore Doolan and Hal Morris. Seemingly everything Lenore and Hal might have shared together – more than 300 items in total – is here photographed and catalogued, complete with opening bids. Someone, it seems, is trying very hard to forget.

Much of the pleasure in Important Artifacts is visual. The thought and design put into this project – particularly the assemblage of all the items, including photographs of the couple and their friends – is fun to think about and easy to admire. The fiction itself centres on a contrivance that begs a lot of interesting questions – many of which the story’s form make impossible to answer. Who is putting up the lot for auction? Why? And who is going to pay the asking price of, say, lot 1176, one of several notes passed back and forth between the couple on the back of an ATM receipt (US$10–US$20)? Does Hal’s designer luggage tell us more about him or his habits of consumption? In turn, what would their habits of consumption tell us about their inner selves – access to which we’d take as a given in more traditional fiction? These seem like reasonable questions, and engaging with them is a pleasure in its own right. But ask them too intently and you’ll trample on Shapton’s delicacy. She’s simultaneously invented a form – a sort of fiction-as-still-life – and probably broken the mould on it.

Pete Coco