Artifact
by Arlene Heyman
(Bloomsbury, $30)
Reviewed by Siobhan Harvey
A wide-ranging examination of a biologist's life, Arlene Heyman's first novel, Artifact, is a deep character study. At its heart is a faulted heroine, Lottie Kristin. Through two marriages, the birth of multiple children, the quandaries of sex in a pre-birth
control age, the challenges of raising stepchildren, the loss of family members and trying – and failing – to set down roots in American backwaters, the book authentically illuminates the struggles women with children who want careers faced in the past, with a relevancy which remains resonant to working mothers today.
The novel opens in New York in the mid-1980s with Lottie escaping her crowded family home on a stifling August day for the respite of the university lab. The gruesome decapitation of rats that follows offers more than momentary insight into Lottie's complex character, a woman as meticulous as she is detached. Firstly the scene's motivation also offers a caustic expose of academia's long-standing misogynistic practices, for these unnecessary sacrifices are carried out to discredit the patronising objections from male researchers Lottie's groundbreaking research has received. Moreover the passage, its rationale and subtext, provides a filmic mise-en-scene for the wider story.
For where this female cell biologist adored by students has achieved senior academic status, she has done so in defiance of extensive visible and invisible social, familial, ancestral, personal, educational and biological constraints visited upon her, because she's a woman. From a cloistered 1950s Midwestern girlhood full of secrets and loss to a teenage triste with a sports-jock and early pregnancy, from keen juvenile scientific curiosity to repressive educational expectation, the cultural strictures placed upon Lottie are carefully and eloquently itemised by Heyman. Even her body and its reproductive parts oppose her desire to forge a career path equal to male scholars.
That these moments of confrontation across the timeline of the novel are credible testifies to Heyman's writing skill. But beyond enabling art to reflect the authenticity of existence, the author raises the emotional timbre of the novel with a prose style at once poetic and perceptive. Even those lab rats, in their last seconds, are described with an insight and cadence which brings music and dark detachment to their slaughter.
