Review: Artifact

Artifact by Arlene Heyman (Bloomsbury £12.99)

Reaching the end of Arlene Heyman’s debut novel, Artifact, I found myself hard-pressed to say why I’d enjoyed the book, or even what it was really about. The novel covers several decades, from the 1940s onwards, and straddles subjects including feminism, motherhood, scientific research, depression, poetry, sex and sexual violence, without necessarily focusing on any of them.

It is a meandering tale, graphic and shocking at times and meditative at others, which doesn’t so much reach a conclusion as simply end. By the final pages, I wasn’t sure I really knew more about the protagonist’s motivations than I did at the outset.

And yet, for all that, it was never a struggle to read; on the contrary, I found myself eager to turn the pages. Heyman’s heroine, Lottie, comes from a typical middle-American family and her life looks set to follow a certain pathway; early marriage to the high-school football star, motherhood and suburban bliss. An accident and getting a job — in a laboratory — puts paid to that conventional expectation (this is not a spoiler, as the book opens two decades on with her hitched to a Jewish music teacher and living outside New York) and instead she embarks on a road towards independence and self-discovery.