Natalie Lemle's New Thriller Was Inspired By A Real Art World Scandal

As a college student triple-majoring in classics, art history, and Italian, Natalie Lemle envisioned becoming an archaeologist unearthing treasures in cargo pants and a wide-brimmed hat. But when her first dig brought nothing but sweat, dust, and grueling manual labor, her ambitions came to a halt.

“In the end, it was the PhD students who were allowed to actually catalog things and handle the objects,” Lemle tells Bustle. “We were just pickaxing and troweling all day in the hot Tuscan sun. I just thought, maybe this is not for me.”

Instead, she founded an art advisory business, art_works, which commissions work for clients as large as Google. And while Lemle had always written as a hobby, she began to take it seriously during the pandemic when she enrolled in an MFA program at Emerson College.

In her debut thriller Artifacts (out last month), protagonist Lena is an aspiring archaeologist-turned-lawyer. Readers first meet her as in 2022, when she’s asked to work a case involving a stolen Italian artifact with ambiguous provenance. The shady circumstances around the object splits the book’s timeline in two, folding in flashbacks from 2004, when Lena is a college student on a dig in Orbagne, a fictional town in the Italian Alps. There, she navigates mounting scrutiny around the project, her relationship with her family, and a whirlwind summer romance. But, as the truth behind the object slowly materializes, Lena finds herself caught in a web of high-stakes players and grave danger.

Though the risky circumstances and looming mafioso presence carry throughout, the heart of the novel is in its exploration of origin: both of the art itself and the book’s cast of characters as they grapple with their own histories. Below, Lemle opens up about art restitution law, re-invention, and adapting Artifacts for screen.

Is there a specific art restitution case you saw in the news that inspired this novel?

Around the time that I started drafting the novel in 2021, there was a big scandal at the Fordham University Museum of Art, which only consists of ancient art. It wasn't so much a standard restitution case as it was a shady group donation.

I am constantly coming into contact with university museum collections with these kinds of problems. Even at my alma mater, Tufts University Art Galleries, there have been tons of gifts of art that were given as a group and that maybe not every single object was catalogued at the time of accession, and they were sort of reckoning with what to do with some of these things that had been requested to come back.

In this book, a lot of characters are tainted in some way by the restitution case. How did you navigate this morally grey area?

I was thinking more about how they’re all trying to distance themselves from whatever they'd inherited from their parents, and figure out what stories about themselves they want to rewrite.

So I think this idea of culpability comes into play because as much as they want to have agency, they don't necessarily want to take responsibility for themselves.

So that's one of the overarching lessons of the novel. When we talk about restitution it's very easy to put the onus on somebody else to decide what to do. When it comes to records around these objects, somebody actually has to do it.

I don't fully blame the curators or the dealers or the registrars who don’t attempt to fill in the gaps. It's a human impulse.

What do you hope readers take away from this novel?

My hope for Artifacts is to illuminate this dark corner of the art world. I'm definitely not delusional to think that this could actually drive any kind of change, but I do think that so much of what goes on in the art and museum worlds is unknown to the vast majority of us.

So the goal is to help people understand that these are real things that are happening. This is not fantasy. Everything in the novel is actually plausible, even down to that particular villa that I invented in the Italian Alps.

You’ve mentioned that you’re working on a new book dealing with medieval work!

The book is about two sisters that take their families on an ill-fated vacation to Southern Tuscany. When one of their hosts mysteriously dies they get stuck as witnesses and they can't leave the country and they're trying to figure out what happened.

It's a bit of my take on a whodunit, but my main character, the older sister, is a failed medievalist. So she's trying to revive her dissertation as part of this. You don't really know for sure what she's making up and what actually happened.

I hear that you may be in the process of adapting Artifacts for the screen, do you have a dream casting for Lena?

I think the tricky thing is whoever it is would need to be able to play both a 19-year-old and a 37-year-old believably. I could totally see Daisy, Edgar Jones or Rooney Mara. I'm thinking of actors who can seem both naive but also quite stubborn.