Race, Politics, & Underwater Caves

Recently, I've been reading my way through the fiction of Barbara Kingsolver. I enjoyed The Poisonwood Bible in high school, but though I was curious about her other books, I put off reading them at the time. In the back of my mind, I think I was suspicious they'd be "too girly" (and, then, I might have found them so). I'm glad I went back. Homeland reminded me that short stories can be satisfying. The Bean Trees and later novels entertained, made me think, and presented pleasantly complex female characters.

I started with an old box set that included Homeland, The Bean Trees, Pigs in Heaven, and Animal Dreams. I went to on to re-read Poisonwood Bible, then bought and read Prodigal Summer. When I got to The Lacuna, however, I hesitated. The title alone sounded unpleasantly postmodern. I'm a Frida Kahlo fan, but I've read plenty of books that sacrificed soul to documentary accuracy when they tried to mix in historical figures. Plus, books (and movies) about McCarthyism tend to leave me feeling ineffectually angry rather than roused, motivated, or edified. The Lacuna, in other words looked like an ambitious, possible "important" book -- one that seemed likely to be worth reading but didn't promise much pleasure along the way.

So, I decided to take a break. The Native American themes in Kingsolver reminded me of another writer who had been, for me, a one hit wonder. Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony was the highlight of my required reading list at about the time Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible came out, but I had never read any of her other books. In fact, I didn't know she had written other books until a few years ago, when a friend who had studied her oeuvre in a college course suggested some of her other books might blow my mind. I appreciated the various feminist mythologies that played into Gardens in the Dunes, but at times I felt disengaged, the distance between the characters and the reader too great. Silko's massive Almanac of the Dead, one the other hand, became a labrious read: It's hard to fault an author for expressing anger or for describing distasteful realities (or almost-realities); still, Almanac struck me as a book that seemed to take more from the reader than it gave. Moreover, after more than 700 pages of reader investment, the ending seemed anticlimactic. [True, I'm not one to pick up on numerical subtleties, and calendars run through; maybe someday I'll do some background reading that will help me appreciate some of the extra layers to Silko's tale.] There is heart and soul to Almanac (heart and soul that I think inhabit very much the same place they do in Silko's powerful Ceremony), but it's deeply buried.

I worried that Lacuna, too, might prove more effort than entertainment. I couldn't have been more wrong. The book drew me in right away. The first chapter has some beautiful prose and introduces the intriguing characters of Salome and Leandro, but the story really picks up when the diary entries start. (And, for a reader who generally prefers third to first person, that's saying something.) The narrator (one of Kingsolver's rare male protagonists) is likable, and there's a subtle tension in his desires to reveal as well as conceal.

There's a danger in beginning with a fourteen-year-old protagonist, but Kingsolver makes the narrator's youth both interesting and integral to the unfolding story. She also avoids the potential solipsism of a novel about a writer. True, the most vibrant passages describe the narrator's Mexican cooking, not his writing. Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo add color and energy; they spring to life just as I'd imagined them. (If there's a fault to their portrayal, perhaps it's that they're too much as one might imagine, too likable despite their faults.) Trotsky -- though portrayed even more sympathetically -- comes off less larger-than-life. The historical figures are tied into action as well as theme; they don't come off as mere decoration, and they don't steal the scene either.

Though the reader has a pretty good idea of where things are going, there's enough mystery to keep the pages turning. Kingsolver's creation, Harrison William Shepherd, is a protagonist well worth getting to know.

The Lacuna is much more than a political statement, but politics has an unabashed part to play. In the author interview following the novel, Kingsolver reveals that one of the inspirations for the book was a question: "Why is the relationship between art and politics such an uneasy one in the U.S.? Most people in other places tend to view these as inseparable."

I've seen and read plenty of works deploring the censorship and persecutions of the McCarthy era. The Lacuna is the only one that's made me wonder: What happened to bring the McCarthy era to the end?

That said, don't let worries about politics or postmodernism keep you away from The Lacuna. It is, first and foremost, an engaging story.