Besides her considerable accomplishments as a writer, what makes Barbara
Kingsolver so beloved is the balance in her work between a certain
sentimental tendency – about her characters, about nature, about politics –
and a biologist’s-eye-view of the world, which for the most part keeps this
in check. In her new novel, The Lacuna, the first for nine years, many of
the preoccupations that shaped The Poisonwood Bible re-emerge in a new
setting.
The main character and partial narrator (his diary entries and letters, with
occasional interjections from an “archivist”, tell the story) is Harrison
Shepherd. Born in 1916, he is taken as a child from the United States to
Mexico, where he lives in a succession of households as his glamorous,
increasingly desperate mother Salomé attempts to make her fortune one man at
a time. These early sections of the novel, in which the boy is discovering
Mexico – its people, its history, the howler monkeys and the underwater
caves that give the book its title and central metaphor – are lyrical and
compelling.
Alone a good deal, Shepherd makes friends with the servants, and learns all
sorts of tricks, including how to make the smoothest dough for pan dulces.
The technique, it turns out, is also perfect for mixing plaster – food and
art are often linked for Kingsolver – and the boy attracts the attention of
Diego Rivera, at work on one of his vast murals.
Sent to military school in the US, Shepherd is kicked out for an
“inappropriate” relationship with another student (his “mental and sexual
deviance” will later also exempt him from military service in the Second
World War). On his return to Mexico he finds his way on to the household
staff of Rivera and Frida Kahlo – a much more exciting place to spend the
revolutionary 1930s than the Potomac Academy. At their house he meets the
exiled Trotsky, and helps him in his work. In the frightening aftermath of
Trotsky’s assassination, Kahlo helps Shepherd to emigrate by sending him to
the US as a courier with some of her paintings. He settles down to work on
his fiction in Thomas Wolfe country: Asheville, North Carolina.
Kingsolver is drawn to the idea of the good man under attack. The brief but
heartfelt portrayal of Patrice Lumumba in The Poisonwood Bible, as the lone
leader in whom the people have invested all their hopes, and who must
therefore be “cut down”, is echoed here in Trotsky, presented here, not for
the first time, as unequivocally noble. The division into good and bad
becomes more difficult when the natural world is involved: nature is amoral
and indifferent, and here we are shown the biologist’s impulse, if not
towards truth, then at least towards a kind of dispassionate observation;
this sometimes stays Kingsolver’s hand and complicates her idealism.
There is a constant tension in the novel between isolation and its opposite;
both are double-edged. Exile of various kinds is both a violent punishment
and an opportunity: it separates you from others, making you a “permanent
foreigner”, and at the same time allows you to escape the limitations of
your former life, to understand the world differently. The Mexican howler
monkeys on the island where Shepherd grows up, which he first imagines as
threatening and bloodthirsty, are themselves exiles: they travelled to the
island on an isthmus that no longer exists, and were stranded. Kingsolver is
fascinated by the relationships people form with their surroundings, and
with each other. At times this too seems like a clear moral problem: she
draws a stark contrast between those who respect, and cooperate with, the
land and those who attempt to conquer or control it. Women, especially, are
“marked” or even “embossed” by men. Yet the question of community is an
ambivalent one.
Throughout the novel, ambiguous images of group living recur, most often a
shoal of fish, with its “bright liquid life” and its “single jumpy heart”,
the joint intelligence that mysteriously lets it move as one being,
protecting itself from predators. As a young man, Shepherd imagines the fish
will make their escape at the last possible moment, leaving him to the
sharks. Later, money is described in similar terms: moving, recirculating
and forming new meanings. The American spirit of individualism, with its
“declarative . . . I am”, is revealed as a fantasy. It is clear that the
lives of US citizens are just as interdependent as those in Mexico, that
suspect den of communists. The dark side of this, a mob-like tendency,
becomes more and more evident with the emergence of the red scare.
Part of Kingsolver’s mistrust of power, especially American power with its
desire to mark itself on individuals and on nations, is an interest in
people on the margins of history, and especially in supporting players, in
the wives and children and cooks and secretaries. She looks behind and
between, at the secret breathings and whirrings of events. In The Lacuna, we
get a longer look at the famous, visible characters. It feels perverse,
then, to be a little bored with feisty Frida Kahlo and loveable Lev Trotsky
and their well-known affair, to snatch instead at the few glimpses we get of
Trotsky’s wife Natalya, who has suffered political exile, the loss of her
children and countless other pains before this smaller domestic one, a woman
who, we are told, each afternoon, “parks her black shoes like two tiny
automobiles beside her bed and lies down, fully dressed, to survive the
remainder of the day”. Yet Kingsolver seems to invite us to feel this way.
“There will never be another Frida”, says Shepherd adoringly; it is true,
but we already know what a character she is. We have seen her bloodied
self-portraits and we know that in her, affection is “a game of cat and
mouse”. In a way she is an unrewarding subject for fiction: what Frida could
Kingsolver reveal who would surprise and delight us in the way she should?
She explains to Shepherd how she has created an image, a protective self,
and in fact she did create one that seems impossible to penetrate.
As the novel progresses, this problem grows. Shepherd is a natural observer –
a novelist, after all – attentive, as writers are, to his surroundings and
alert, as lonely people are, to the workings of others’ relationships. When
he returns to the US, acquires his own quiet, loyal amanuensis (Violet
Brown, the archivist without whom Shepherd’s narrative would not have
survived to be read) and moves to the centre of the story as a beleaguered
artist in the era of HUAC, the story begins to suffer. This is not just
because the portrait of the writer as stalwart in the face of American
prejudice and persecution threatens to grow tiresome. The character’s
writerliness is crucial to him, and to the novel; it allows him to provide
vivid portraits of the people around him. Shepherd’s strength as a recorder
of events – his own lack of personal life – begins to feel like a weakness.
As an adult he forms no lasting romantic attachment; his mother recedes,
replaced to all intents and purposes by Frida who, after his departure from
Mexico, is only seen occasionally in letters. The novel is long, and for
well over 200 pages the only significant relationship we have to observe is
the respectful, admiring friendship between the writer and his secretary.
What is frustrating about The Lacuna is that the emotional heart of the story
seems to retreat, to do a disappearing act almost exactly halfway through
the book. Given the central image of the underwater cave into which people
disappear, and which seems itself to vanish at high tide, this cannot be a
coincidence. Telling the story behind the story is too easy for Kingsolver:
now she wants to tell the story that refuses to be told, to show how it
resists its own telling, how the truth retreats and hides from us the more
we try to pin it down. “The most important part of any story is the missing
piece”, and as Frida says, the crucial thing about someone is always the
thing you do not know. Images of gaps and lacunae multiply throughout the
text: letters thrown away unread, notebooks lost, objects and documents
stolen, things unsaid. The point is not that these things truly disappear –
indeed there is a sense that true disappearance may be impossible – but that
they leave no decipherable trace. The attempts people make to understand one
another are constantly frustrated. At times they almost give up the attempt:
Shepherd leaves a package from Frida unopened for a long time, because he is
not “susceptible to suspense”, and expects no good outcome.
Shepherd writes novels about Mexico’s past, trying to conjure up the unheroic,
everyday lives of the ancients. He is frustrated by the monumental effect of
the great stone structures they left behind, constantly reminding himself
that the stark grandeur of them is an illusion created by time, that they
were covered once with the same wild colours still to be seen everywhere in
Mexico.
In the end, Kingsolver gives the idea of disappearance a surprising moral
dimension. When Shepherd and Violet Brown decry the constant talk in
America, the gossip, the radio, the filling in of silences with lies – “God
speaks for the silent man” – they risk self-righteousness. Yet a more subtle
observation is at stake, and at last it emerges in a conversation they have
about the Mayans, and whether they should consider themselves a “failed
culture” because they are no longer a dominant one. “No use admiring a thing
just because it lasted”, Brown tells Shepherd. Perhaps, she suggests, rather
than glorifying the urge of writers and politicians and lovers to be
remembered, to impress themselves on the world, “we should admire people the
most for living in this jungle without leaving one mark on it”.
Barbara Kingsolver
THE LACUNA
527pp. Faber. £18.99.
978 0 571 25263 3
Lidija Haas works at the London Review of Books.
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