The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

The Lacuna is the first Barbara Kingsolver novel published in nine years and her fans who appreciate her rich and vivid language will not be disappointed. Told as a posthumous memoir in a series of journals of Harrison William Shepherd the son of a Mexican mother and American father and chronicles his life beginning as a boy growing to manhood in Mexico. Life with his mother is tenuous and as Harrison moves with her from the remote and beautiful Isla Pixol to Mexico City, growing from boy to man, his haphazard upbringing and education consists of whatever he is able to glean from the various hired help who put him to work.

It is Shepherd’s early experience in the kitchen that is the unlikely catalyst that brings him into the lives of none other than the great Mexican muralist and political socialist Diego Rivera. Through Rivera he works for and becomes friends with Frida Kahlo and Leon Trotsky, the exiled Communist leader who is living with the two artists. It is these experiences that help him solidify his principles about humanity: adulthood, politics, sexuality, and literature and art.

After the violent assassination of Trotsky a traumatized and frightened Shepherd flees for America in the midst of a torrent of very public accusations and turmoil swirling around Rivera and people associated with him. Shepherd arrives on the east coast of the United States, just after the end of WWII and the anti-communist furor was building. He brings with him his writing and his love of Mexican history and culture.

He reinvents himself in Asheville, North Carolina as a reclusive writer of historical romances set in Mexico. His debut novel is received to popular acclaim and Shepherd attracts the attention of American readers and, later, bureaucrats within the House Un-American Activities Committee, who begin to piece together their own version of who they think Harrison William Shepherd is.

The Lacuna is a smooth, well-written book that can be enjoyed merely for its thoroughly absorbing story but it is a novel that can hold its own for a more in depth read. True to much of Kingsolver’s fiction, she has conducted considerable research for her novel: of the time, from 1920’s to 1951 in two countries’ culture and politics, and in the characters, Kahlo, Rivera, and Trotsky giving dimension to an already intriguing real-life story. Throughout the story, as told in Shepherd’s diaries and compiled by Shepherd’s loyal Ashville secretary, Kingsolver explores themes from the multiple meanings of ‘lacuna’: a gap or missing part as in a manuscript, an underwater cave. She intertwines her trove of information with expansive artistic freedom, to making unspoken connections with historical events of the politics in the United States to more current political events of today that are impossible to ignore. As with many of her tales Kingsolver takes advantage of the power fiction can wield to speak truths that nonfiction media too often remain silent to.

Review posted by: Amanda Clarke