2020-05-04
The making of a woman scientist over four decades of change in the middle of the 20th century.
“So what do you actually do?” Dr. Lottie Kristin Hart Levinson—aka Dr. Rat Westheimer—is asked at a cocktail party in 1984. “This may sound odd to you,” she replies, “but I study rat salivary glands. They’re more important than people think.” Her subsequent explanation details the role of cunnilingus in rat sex. Neither Lottie nor her creator is squeamish in any way—not about rat sex, or rat dissection, or human sex, all described with brio in these pages. As Lottie tells her football-star high school boyfriend, who becomes her first husband, “I want to know everything about my body, about your body, I want to try everything there is in the world, I want to try it all with you.” Actually, she saves some for her intrepid second husband 30-odd years later; there hasn’t been a menstruation sex scene like this since Scott Spencer’s Endless Love. Heyman’s debut novel after a successful story collection, Scary Old Sex (2016), also brings to mind Marge Piercy’s domestic dramas of the 1980s, which told the stories of women whose consciousness and lives were changed by the feminist movement and the new options it created in American life. From Lottie’s childhood in Michigan in the early 1940s through her struggles in the Vietnam War era to her maturity as a scientist, mother, and stepmother in the mid-1980s, her curiosity and intellect drive her as strongly as her hormones. It takes decades to tunnel her way through the walls sexism builds around her potential and find her way to the career in science she was made for. Caring as much about her work as she does about domestic life is a constant issue in Lottie’s adulthood; tragic consequences threaten and are not always averted.
Like its heroine, intelligent and lusty; full of real joys and sorrows.
Proudly corporeal, fascinated by the workings of the physical form where our desires are housed as our tragedies are recorded . . . An homage to the body's capacity to impart amazement even after death.” —Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
“[Artifact] feels, more than anything, like an artifact of so many women's lives.” —Lynn Steger Strong, New York Times Book Review
“Like its heroine, intelligent and lusty; full of real joys and sorrows.” —Kirkus
“Heyman presents a first novel with prose shaped by a keen ear for language, and she confronts female sexuality, aspiration, motherhood, and sexism with eyes wide open.” —Booklist
“Readers will delight in this portrait of a woman who was both a product of and a challenge to her times.” —Bookreporter
“A sparse, moving portrait of a woman's journey through life as she follows her scientific passion . . . Full of vim and vigor.” —Washington Independent Review of Books
“A heart-palpitating story of womanhood, ambition, and scientific inquiry. Lottie, the main character, longs for what we all long for: well-being, connection, and the ability to pursue our capacities, in a world that sometimes tries to dampen desire, particularly the wants of women. I found Artifact to be thrilling, funny, evocative, and true.” —TaraShea Nesbit, author of THE WIVES OF LOS ALAMOS and BEHELD
“Artifact is an exquisite and deeply wise novel about a woman's coming of age as both a mother and a scientist. It's a bold, funny, brilliantly acute portrait of a person who pursues her intellectual ambitions in a world that treats her as unnatural for having them. Heyman's Lottie is stubbornly honest, unabashedly sexual and full of passionate love both for her family and her work. This is a thrilling book that-like all the best literature-leaves you feeling as if you've been through a major life experience and you're stronger for it.” —Sandra Newman, author of THE HEAVENS
“Artifact is a knock-out of a novel, with a hard-to-love, impossible-not-to-love heroine, Lottie, whose jittery journey from pregnant teenager to acknowledged scientist is related with beauty and honesty. Arlene Heyman digs deeply, so very deeply, into the complexities of sexual desire, young and not-so-young love, maternal devotion and impatience and searing guilt, the exhaustions and pleasures of a professional life, and the messy workings of a blended family. Readers will come to embrace Lottie in all her touching imperfections, and—like me—they may find themselves remembering and missing her when her story comes to an end.” —Judith Viorst, author of NECESSARY LOSSES and I'M TOO YOUNG TO BE SEVENTY
“This is the story of a dauntingly independent woman's compelling need to pursue the mysteries of life, including her own body. Lottie Kristin is many things: a wife, a mother, a cell biologist, and a woman willing to be discomfortingly candid. I hope Heyman writes a sequel so we can know what she does next.” —Gail Godwin, author of FLORA, EVENSONG, and OLD LOVEGOOD GIRLS
“Heyman pays such sustained and stylish attention to late-life lovemaking . . . that you may feel you are reading about it for the first time . . . Rueful and funny and observant . . . Heyman is an enlightened observer across many aspects of life . . . These men and women are busily and blissfully humanizing themselves, the kind of bliss that lifts right off the page.” —Dwight Garner, New York Times
“The graphic, funny, tender and shocking stories in New York psychiatrist Arlene Heyman's debut collection are aptly titled . . . Scary Old Sex has a lot more literary history and mystery going for it than most first-time collections. It's always an event when the silent muse speaks up for herself, and in Heyman's case, the muse's voice is lusty, tough and life-affirming.” —Elaine Showalter, Guardian
“Heyman's frank tales . . . feel paradoxically taboo on the page, all the more so for the fierce candor with which they examine the sexuality of older women, a demographic generally assumed to have none to speak of . . . Writers, show us more older women, ones whose desires are powerful rather than pitiable. Some might call it a nightmare; really, it would be a dream come true.” —Alexandra Schwartz, New Yorker
“Powerful . . . Engaging . . . Rich in canny eroticism, late-life regrets and intimations of mortality . . . 'One gets over nothing in this life,' Heyman writes—a psychoanalytic truism perhaps, but also an apt thematic summary of this lovely book.” —Forward
“Flaws make these characters so real and dimensional, their stories so readable and resonant . . . Heyman has been described as [Bernard] Malamud's muse. Judging from these stories, he may have been hers as well. The stories in this keenly observed collection lay bare truths-some comforting, others uncomfortable-about love and sex, aging and acceptance.” —Kirkus (starred review)
