The Lacuna (2009)
Barbara Kingsolver (1955-)
507 pages
The most important part of a story is the piece of it you don’t know.Around this simple but often forgotten truth turns Barbara Kingsolver’s wonderful novel “The Lacuna”. Through a narrator who we come to know mainly indirectly, by way of his descriptions of the people and events of his life, Kingsolver introduces us to “piece[s we] don’t know” about some of the most colorful personalities and dramatic happenings of the mid-20th century.
The narrator, Harrison Shepherd, is a young teenager in 1929 when the novel opens, living with his mother on a small island off the eastern coast of Mexico. She has separated from her American husband (Shepherd’s father), who remains behind in Washington D.C.. Over two decades Shepherd lives for extended periods in both Mexico and the United States.
Kingsolver constructs the novel mostly through diary entries from Shepherd, in addition to some of his letters and a few newspaper articles. Thus the story is told nearly entirely from Shepherd’s point of view. A watchful, insightful and obsessive diarist, he represents for the reader a trusted documenter of the world he encounters, even if at the same time he remains a largely cryptic character, seldom writing about himself.
In Mexico he finds work as an older teenager with the painter Diego Rivera, eventually joining Rivera’s household staff as a cook. In this way he comes to know and become befriended by Rivera’s wife, the artist Frida Kahlo. Rivera and Kahlo were larger-than-life figures in the 1930’s and 40’s, who shocked the art world with their avant-garde painting styles. They also played a highly visible role in world politics by hosting Leon Trotsky, who was on the run from assassins working for Lenin’s secret police, and supporting communist groups agitating in Mexico.
Through Shepherd, Kingsolver reveals the lives and characters of Rivera and particularly Kahlo in ways that a biography could never do. With a few exceptions we don’t learn about where they went when, but rather how they were as people, what they thought about their world and how they lived their daily lives. Imagined details and conversations, certainly, but developed from Kingsolver’s research of documents, pictures and paintings in the historical record, and which bring the pair of artists to life in front of our eyes. When Shepherd documents his conversations and encounters with Frida Kahlo, the rendering is so vivid that as readers we find ourselves backing away from her bluster and empathizing with her vulnerabilities as though she were with us in the room. Kingsolver’s writing and method of telling the story make the intensity of many of the scenes deeply affecting.
Shepherd leaves Mexico for the United States in 1940, and Kingsolver turns her attention to the U.S., and the austerity and sacrifice of the war years, as well as the attacks on people’s humanity that were the Japanese internments and then the post-war witch hunt for communists. As in the earlier part of the novel we experience these events through Shepherd’s eyes, and what in a history book would be dry and distant becomes in Kingsolver’s hands palpable and close. Shepherd’s diaries and letters bring alive the depth of the sacrifices people made to support the war effort during World War II, and the sudden explosion of production and consumption of household goods in the years after the war. More disturbingly, we experience first-hand the insidious spread of the fear that grew out of the search for the perceived communist menace, turning neighbor on neighbor as many hundreds of innocent people saw their lives destroyed by allegations of being un-American.
Enhancing the story throughout is Kingsolver’s beautiful writing. It is almost a shame to give an example, because it robs a new reader of the joy of discovering it without warning and completely in context --- but just one here to convey the power of her writing: Shepherd has arrived at the Washington train station, in the dead of winter, having been sent by his mother from sunny, warm Mexico to attend school near his father; he comes out of the train station with his father, and “outdoors the sun was cold, shining without heat, like an electric bulb. Crowds hurried along, unconcerned their star had no fire.”
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