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New West Book Review

Barbara Kingsolver Tackles Epic Themes with “The Lacuna”

By Jenny Shank, 11-01-09

The Lacuna
By Barbara Kingsolver
HarperCollins, 464 pages, $26.99

Barbara Kingsolver worked her way up to becoming one of America’s Current Top Novelists the old-fashioned way, beginning by writing smaller, tightly-focused novels with some autobiographical elements, earning a loyal readership through word-of-mouth and independent bookseller raves in her former home base of the Southwest, then expanding her stories to globe-spanning epics such as her riveting The Poisonwood Bible.  Kingsolver has followed up her recent nonfiction bestseller Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, about her family’s quest to eat locally-grown foods for a year, with her first novel in nine years, The Lacuna, a sweeping tale that follows a young man destined to become a popular American novelist in the years before and after he befriends Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Leon Trotsky.  The Lacuna is another epic work, setting one man’s story against the grand events of early twentieth century history, and it’s also a bildungsroman and an epistolatory novel, for those AP English students keeping score at home. 

The Lacuna is one of a handful of titles which Amazon and Walmart, in their current book-price war, will sell for nine bucks, along with genre fiction juggernauts including the latest books by John Grisham and James Patterson.  Kingsolver’s novel is an ironic pick, because leftist politics are at its heart and its protagonist, Harrison Shepherd, is a reclusive, mostly-celibate gay man who writes about Aztec and Mayan history, elements which would not normally cause the books that house them to fly off the shelves.  But The Lacuna will please Kingsolver’s plentiful fans because it is full of the qualities that her books have always contained—striking, precise detail, human passion, vivid language, snappy dialogue, and a singularly fascinating character in Kingsolver’s imagining of Frida Kahlo.

Kingsolver’s Kahlo is so fascinating, indeed, that the reader might wish Kingsolver had given the whole book over to the famous figure, as T.C. Boyle did in his novels about Alfred Kinsey and Frank Lloyd Wright.  But as Kingsolver has Kahlo remark of art critics who write about her paintings, “They write what they think you should be painting.”

Instead of focusing exclusively on Kahlo, Kingsolver paints a broader picture, fashioning the story as a sort of scrapbook that forms a portrait of the artist as a young man.  The first section is an attempt at an autobiography that Harrison wrote in his thirties, and from there the story is carried forward through his journal entries, letters he wrote and received, newspaper and magazine clippings, senate testimony, and notes from his stenographer.

The novel begins in 1929, when Harrison has moved with his mother from Washington, D.C. to Mexico, his mother’s native country, leaving his father behind.  His mother, the vain, domineering and neglectful Salomé, is focused on keeping herself beautiful and on the pursuit of wealthy men.  She installs them in the household of Don Enrique, a Mexican diplomat, who lives on an island where there is no school for Harrison to attend.  The family’s cook, Leandro, befriends him, gives him some diving goggles and teaches him how to cook pan dulce, a skill that comes in handy for Harrison later on.  Salomé does not achieve the marriage proposal she’d hoped for from Don Enrique, so they leave and she takes up with her next beau.

Harrison eventually goes to his father in Washington D.C. for a few years of formal schooling in a military academy, which doesn’t turn out well, and then he returns to Mexico.  He happens upon a crew mixing plaster for one of Diego Rivera’s murals one day, and he jumps in to demonstrate a better method, mixing it as he did the dough for pan dulce in Leandro’s kitchen.  Harrison’s plaster is a hit and Rivera hires him, eventually promoting him from plaster mixer to family cook and secretary.  When Leon Trotsky comes to stay with Rivera and Frida Kahlo, fleeing Stalin’s assassination attempts, Harrison becomes Trotsky’s assistant. 

Halfway through the book, Harrison returns to the United States, moves to Asheville, North Carolina, and eventually begins writing novels that prove so popular he develops what seems to be agoraphobia, afraid to leave the house because of his adoring public.  Frida doesn’t appear in the rest of the book, but into her void steps her compelling opposite, Violet Brown, a sensible, middle-aged widow who becomes Harrison’s secretary and primary confidant.
In the constellation of characters Kingsolver has created, Harrison is the least flashy star.  He’s hard to warm up to at first, in part because of his inwardness and misanthropy.  As he writes in a journal entry late in the book, “People contort themselves around the terror of being alone, making any compromise against that.  It’s a great freedom to give up on love, and get on with everything else.” Most readers will warm to him, but especially to the novel in which Kingsolver has placed him. 

It’s clear from the verve of the language that the material Kingsolver is working with is close to her heart and that she had a lot of fun writing this, especially the off-base reviews of Harrison’s novel (one of which declares the book is set in not Mexico, but ancient Rome), and the silly celebrity magazine pieces about this “most eligible bachelor.” Kingsolver packs The Lacuna with the colorful slang of each decade as Harrison moves through his life, and fills it with great settings, from the vibrant 1930’s Mexican household of Diego and Kahlo to a visit to some Mayan ruins to an apt depiction of small town life in the American South. 

More important to Kingsolver, it’s evident, are the novel’s political themes: Harrison’s early years hobnobbing with communists run him afoul of anti-communist forces after World War II.  Kingsolver recently told the Wall Street Journal, “I’ve wondered why art and politics seem to have an uneasy relationship in the U.S., while they travel hand in hand in most of the world. People elsewhere look to art and literature for commentary on the social and political aspects of the culture.” Kingsolver founded the Bellwether Prize, which seeks to “support a literature of social responsibility.” But as Kingsolver knows well from her many years of writing novels, nobody is going to want to read a political message if the story isn’t any good, and she doesn’t have to worry about that with The Lacuna.  The Lacuna is an enjoyable, satisfying, and moving adventure, worth at least the price of this novel as purchased from an independent bookstore.

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