Kate Atkinson once described her own debut novel this way: “The book is a repository for the past. The book is, in its own way, my own museum.” Jill Lepore takes that as the organizing idea for a short appreciation in The New Yorker’s What We’re Reading newsletter — tracing how completely Atkinson’s fiction is built out of objects, and how much history rides along inside them.

The evidence is mostly in the inventories:

  • Behind the Scenes at the Museum spends two pages unpacking a single small suitcase: winceyette pyjamas, a toothbrush and flannel, ruby-red slippers, five pairs of knickers, a vest, a liberty bodice, two viyella blouses, a kilt, a corduroy pinafore-dress, tartan trews, two hand-knitted jumpers.
  • Her new novel, Our Noble Selves, is set in 1951 — the year of Atkinson’s birth — and follows Harry Flynn as he prepares for the Festival of Britain, the government-run celebration meant to restore British morale after the war.
  • Harry works in the “Department of Rooms,” hunting down objects from the past for displays of British life: measuring cups and spoons, plate racks, condiment sets, soufflé dishes, whistling kettles, a “Spong’s No. 100 household mincer.” Much of the book turns on the baking of a festival cake.

Lepore’s verdict on the new novel is blunt in a useful way: if you have never read Atkinson, do not start here. Harry is accused of a murder he then tries to solve, but the mystery reads as an afterthought. Go to Life After Life instead, where the narrator begins her existence in the early twentieth century over and over again.

What Lepore is really praising is Atkinson as a collector — of genres as much as objects. Domestic novels, war novels, detective fiction since Case Histories (2004), and possibly spy fiction next, judging by a character who arrives late in the new book. There is a quiet argument buried in the piece about what historical fiction is for. The Festival of Britain was a state project of national memory-making, and Atkinson stations her hero inside it, cataloging the utensils of ordinary life — the smallest units of a past that was already being packed away into display cases.