The Lacuna: A Novel

From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. Kingsolver's ambitious new novel, her first in nine years (after the The Poisonwood Bible ), focuses on Harrison William Shepherd, the product of a divorced American father and a Mexican mother. After getting kicked out of his American military academy, Harrison spends his formative years in Mexico in the 1930s in the household of Diego Rivera; his wife, Frida Kahlo; and their houseguest, Leon Trotsky, who is hiding from Soviet assassins. After Trotsky is assassinated, Harrison returns to the U.S., settling down in Asheville, N.C., where he becomes an author of historical potboilers (e.g., Vassals of Majesty ) and is later investigated as a possible subversive. Narrated in the form of letters, diary entries and newspaper clippings, the novel takes a while to get going, but once it does, it achieves a rare dramatic power that reaches its emotional peak when Harrison wittily and eloquently defends himself before the House Un-American Activities Committee (on the panel is a young Dick Nixon). Employed by the American imagination, is how one character describes Harrison, a term that could apply equally to Kingsolver as she masterfully resurrects a dark period in American history with the assured hand of a true literary artist. (Nov.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Bookmarks Magazine The Lacuna contains two very distinct parts. One features a vibrant Mexican landscape with the equally colorful personalities of Rivera, Kahlo, and Trotsky. The other centers more on Harrison's reclusive existence in small-town America and his battle with the House Un-American Activities Committee. Despite the prodigious research that both parts exhibit, critics clearly preferred the former, marveling at Kingsolver's lyrical passages and her expert recreation of 1930s Mexico. A few reviewers also noted instances of sermonizing and inaccurate history. However, the novel's compelling, engrossing story certainly outweighed these minor complaints, and in the end, Kingsolver has created a convincing "tableau vivant of epochs and people that time has transformed almost past recognition" ( New York Times Book Review ). “Rich…impassioned…engrossing…Politics and art dominate the novel, and their overt, unapologetic connection is refreshing.” (Chicago Tribune )“Masterful…a reader receives the great gift of entering not one but several worlds…The final pages haunt me still.” (San Francisco Chronicle Book Review )“Compelling…Kingsolver’s descriptions of life in Mexico City burst with sensory detail—thick sweet breads, vividly painted walls, the lovely white feet of an unattainable love.” (The New Yorker )“A work that is often close to magic.... Much research underlies this complex weaving...but the work is lofted by lyric prose.” (Denver Post )“Shepherd’s story in Kingsolver’s accomplished literary hands is so seductive, the prose so elegant, the architecture of the novel so imaginative, it becomes hard to peel away from the book” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette )“[Kingsolver’s] playful pastiche brings to vivid life the culture wars of an earlier era...” (Vogue )“...True and riveting...Barbara Kingsolver has invented a wondrous filling here, sweeter and thicker than pan dulce, spicy as the hottest Mexican chiles, paranoid as the American government hunting Communists ” (Philadelphia Inquirer )“A sweeping mural of sensory delights and stimulating ideas about art, government, identity and history…Readers will feel the sting of connection between then and now.” (Seattle Times )“A sweeping narrative of utopian dreams and political reality…A stirring novel…intimate and pitch-perfect.” (San Diego Union-Tribune )“Kingsolver deftly combines real history and the life of the fictional protagonist…A sweeping tale.” (Atlanta Journal-Constitution )“The most mature and ambitious [novel] she’s written…An absorbing portrayal of American life…A rich novel [with] a large, colorful canvas…A tender story about a thoughtful man.” (Washington Post )“A lavishly gifted writer... Kingsolver [has a] wonderful ear for the quirks of human repartee. The Lacuna is richly spiked with period language... This book grabs at the heartstrings...” (Los Angeles Times )“Breathtaking...dazzling...The Lacuna can be enjoyed sheerly for the music of its passages on nature, archaeology, food and friendship; or for its portraits of real and invented people...But the fuller value...lies in its call to conscience and connection.” (New York Times Book Review )“The novel achieves a rare dramatic power...Kingsolver masterfully resurrects a dark period in American history with the assured hand of a true literary artist.” (Publishers Weekly (starred review) )“[Kingsolver] hasn’t lost her touch...she delivers her signature blend of exotic locale, political backdrop and immediately engaging story line...teems with dark beauty.” (People )“[Kingsolver] stirs the real with the imagined to produce a breathtakingly ambitious book, bold and rich…hopeful, political and artistic. The Lacuna fills a lacuna with powerfully imagined social history (Kansas City Star ) Barbara Kingsolver's work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has earned a devoted readership at home and abroad. In 2000 she was awarded the National Humanities Medal, our country's highest honor for service through the arts. She received the 2011 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for the body of her work, and in 2010 won Britain's Orange Prize for The Lacuna . Before she made her living as a writer, Kingsolver earned degrees in biology and worked as a scientist. She now lives with her family on a farm in southern Appalachia. From The Washington Post From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by by Ron Charles Barbara Kingsolver's new novel, "The Lacuna," is the most mature and ambitious one she's written during her celebrated 20-year career, but it's also her most demanding. Spanning three decades, the story comes to us as a collection of diary entries and memoir, punctuated by archivist's notes, newspaper articles, letters, book reviews and congressional transcripts involving some of the 20th century's most radical figures. The sweetness that leavened "The Bean Trees" and "Animal Dreams" has been burned away, and the lurid melodrama that enlivened "The Poisonwood Bible" has been replaced by the cool realism of a narrator who feels permanently alienated from the world. That central, though oddly faint, character is Harrison Shepherd, a popular writer of romantic adventure novels. Kingsolver neatly weaves this quiet, watchful man through tumultuous events that rocked two countries, and one of the most impressive feats of "The Lacuna" is how convincingly she tracks his developing voice, from when he's a sensitive teenager in 1929 until he becomes a national celebrity in the early 1950s. The story begins in Mexico when Shepherd is 13, but we gradually learn that he was born in Washington, D.C., the product of a doomed marriage between a dull federal bureaucrat and a saucy Mexican beauty. His mother has abandoned America and taken up with a brutal right-wing businessman in tropical Isla Pixol, hoping to land a better husband. Alone and without any formal education, Shepherd begins reading moldy adventure novels and Mexican history, and he also takes up the lifelong practice of journal writing -- "the beginning of hope: a prisoner's plan for escape." Those journals, carefully transcribed and surreptitiously preserved years later, become the bulk of this complicated novel. A "permanent foreigner," not at home in the United States or Mexico and aware that his budding homosexuality must not be expressed, young Shepherd quickly develops an outsider's detached perspective, tinged with loneliness. He has a sharp eye for the beauty of Mexico, its lush tropics and its colorful towns, and Kingsolver convincingly positions him near some of the era's larger-than-life figures. A handy cook, he gets a job making plaster for the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera and eventually becomes a part of his household. Rivera and his wife, the painter Frida Kahlo, leap off these pages in all their flamboyant passion and brilliance, repeatedly cheating on and punishing each other, even while their international reputation blossoms. As Kahlo's closeted gay confidant, Shepherd offers this gifted female artist a rare chance to share her frustrations about her husband and the shadow he casts over her work. Shepherd's connection with Rivera and Kahlo, both committed communists, quickly brings him into contact with their contentious friend Leon Trotsky, and this fascinating section shows the Russian Revolution from the perspective of one of its reviled and isolated engineers. Constantly at risk of assassination by Stalin's death squads, Trotsky and his frightened wife remain awkwardly holed up in Rivera's house, trying to carry on the workers' battle without money, without an army, without anything but his prodigious writings, which Shepherd neatly types up for him each day. In this touching portrayal of a doomed idealist, the out-maneuvered leader can hardly ignore his irrelevancy. "In 1917 I commanded an army of five million men," he tells Shepherd. "Now I command eleven hens." It's a loser's game trying to estimate the peculiar boundaries of my own ignorance, but I'm willing to go out on a limb and suggest that most readers could use more background than we get here on Trotsky, Rivera and Kahlo. Kingsolver has made Shepherd's diary so realistic that it shows little sense of the needs of some future, public readership. But for the truly interested, background information is newly available: Bertrand M. Patenaude recently published "Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary," a biography of the man's final years in exile. And this month, Robert Service completes his trilogy on the founders of the Soviet Union with "Trotsky." Both books offer a lively and finely detailed description of the bizarre household that Kingsolver dramatizes. The second half of "The Lacuna" shifts, like "The Poisonwood Bible," from an exotic foreign land to the United States. Shepherd moves to a small town in North Carolina in the 1940s and eventually finds himself in the odd position of being an agoraphobic, homosexual heartthrob to millions of female readers. "Nearly every day," he confesses, "I wake up shocked at how little in this world I comprehend." Though this section is much less dramatic than his adventures in Mexico, it offers an absorbing portrayal of American life at a time when the country moved swiftly from Depression, to World War, to consumerism spun through with political paranoia. The other considerable pleasure of this second half is the subtle depiction of Shepherd's relationship with his discreet secretary, Violet Brown, a 46-year-old widow, "sensible as pancake flour," who speaks in the antiquated English of Shakespeare's day. Theirs is an intense but formal affiliation, cemented by her devotion and his respect. In the notes she supplies to Shepherd's journals, she remarks on his "secretive temperament" and suggests that he suffered from "some kind of dread that went past the bashfulness." But she's determined to preserve his memory, even if he exists in these voluminous clippings and diary entries only as a kind of lacuna, or missing space, whose life is suggested by the shape of everything he describes around him. It's a lovely portrait of an intensely private writer, a man who suffered both the benefits of fame and the horrible costs. From beginning to end, though, this is also a novel of capital-L Liberal ideas -- workers' rights, sexual equality, artistic freedom -- the kind of progressive causes that Kingsolver tries to encourage with her Bellwether Prize for socially responsible fiction. More often than not, that's a recipe for Literature for the Betterment of the People, in which all the precious brown-skinned characters and the requisite Mystical Negro line up against a battalion of wicked white landowners. Kingsolver is far too good a writer for that (though not all the Bellwether winners are), but the concluding section of "The Lacuna," in which Shepherd is harassed by J. Edgar Hoover's cronies, recites a predictable Red Scare story we've heard many times before: the just-the-facts FBI agent who asks incriminating questions, the mysterious collapse of the blacklisted writer's career, the outrageous behavior of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Considering the audience for literary fiction -- Kingsolver's in particular -- it's unlikely that "The Lacuna" will shock or change a single right-thinking mind. Nevertheless, this rich novel is certainly bigger than its politics. It resurrects several dramatic events of the early 20th century that have fallen out of public consciousness, brings alive the forgotten details of everyday life in the 1940s, and illustrates how attitudes and prejudices are shaped by political opportunism and the rapacious media. But despite this large, colorful canvas, ultimately "The Lacuna" is a tender story about a thoughtful man who just wanted to enjoy that basic American right: the right to be left alone. As he was fond of saying, "The most important part of the story is the piece of it you don't know." [email protected] Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. Read more