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"The
Lacuna" by
Barbara Kingsolver
; HarperCollins (507 pages,
$26.99
)
———
Barbara Kingsolver
is a prod to the nation's conscience.
Her novel
"The Poisonwood Bible" laid bare misguided
missionary zeal. "Prodigal Summer" established
our interconnectedness with the larger plant and animal
world. As founder of the Bellwether Prize for Fiction,
she's encouraging a new crop of social novelists.
"The
Lacuna" fits into this tradition. It explores the
social and historical context of America's reactionary
fear of those who presume to question our system of
government. The author stirs the real with the imagined
to produce a breathtakingly ambitious book, bold and
rich. If her dramatized history lesson feels at times
forced, it also feels important.
Where the
book sags under the weight of so many good intentions,
two vital female characters prop it up: the saucy
Mexican artist
Frida Kahlo
and the fictional archivist-stenographer
Violet Brown
.
"The
Lacuna" covers the years 1929 to 1951 in the life
of blue-eyed
Harrison Shepherd
, born of a Mexican mother and an American father. A
portmanteau of two cultures, Shepherd is the novel's
shy, repressed protagonist. Torn between the cultural
heritage of parents who wouldn't earn the
Good Housekeeping
seal of approval, Shepherd is that odd breed, an
"orphan boy" with two living parents.
Harrison
is taken to an island off the coast of
Mexico
at age 12 by his mother, who has become attached to a
Mexican attache. Ignored by a mother who is foulmouthed,
colloquial and colossally selfish, he is mostly paid
attention to by members of the hacienda's staff. He
finds comfort in words scribbled in notebooks and in
swimming through openings in the coastal cliffside
called lacunas.
The
lacuna is the novel's controlling metaphor. It is a gap
or missing part, and the word keeps turning up, a
seaside penny, to suggest our incomplete understanding
of others' stories.
Before
long, Harrison's mother ships him to America to his
father, a government "bean counter." Enrolled
in a military academy, the teenager witnesses the
Bonus Army
riots of homeless veterans and experiences his own
internal riot when he has an affair with a scholarship
student.
This
"irregular conduct" gets him booted from
military school and sends him back to
Mexico
, where he ends up a plaster-mixer for the muralist
Diego Rivera
. He graduates to household cook, applying his kneading
skills to dough rather than plaster.
Rivera's
wife, artist
Frida Kahlo
, becomes Harrison's ally and confidante. She gives him
the nickname Insolito after she learns of his military
school "conducta insolita," or irregular
conduct.
The Kahlo-Rivera
household simmers, a rich and colorful brew of talent,
politics and infidelities. At night, Harrison records
events in his journals, earning him a job as Rivera's
secretary.
When
Trotsky is given shelter by Rivera,
Harrison Shepherd
adds secretary to the famous revolutionary to his
resume. And when the fatherly Trotsky decamps, Harrison
follows.
Trotsky's
assassination puts Harrison in personal peril, and the
police trash years of his journals and the beginnings of
a novel, or so it seems. The fiery Kahlo comes to his
rescue. She sends him as a "shipping shepherd"
with eight of her paintings destined for the
Museum of Modern Art
in his native America.
Harrison Shepherd
finds that his father has died and left him only a
Chevrolet. He drives to
Asheville, N.C.
, where, in a delicious turn of events, he becomes a
best-selling author of what Kingsolver called, in an
interview, "the Pre-Columbian Potboiler."
When the
success of his books threatens to upend the reclusive
scribbler, he hires
Violet Brown
as his stenographer/assistant. So the transcriber of the
thoughts of Rivera and Trotsky now finds himself in need
of secretarial services.
Violet Brown
is totally winning: practical, determined, ethical, a
vital punctuation mark to the central character's
repressed passivity. Descended from "Mountain
Whites," she speaks a backwoods Shakespearean
dialect.
The
quaint
Violet Brown
saves the last third of "The Lacuna" from
Harrison Shepherd's
inability to act on his own behalf.
A
pastiche of letters, notebook and diary entries,
invented and real newspaper and magazine articles,
"The Lacuna" dares to question America's
historical myopia and a national history full of gaps.
When
Harrison's employment by known Communists gets him in
trouble as the 1950s witch-hunts begin, he is asked why
he stayed in America by the Special Subcommittee of the
Committee on Un-American Activities
. His response: " ... I decided to try my hand at
making art for the hopeful. Because I wasn't any good at
the other thing, manufacturing hopes for the artful.
America was the most hopeful place I'd ever
imagined."
Kingsolver's
seventh work of fiction is hopeful, political and
artistic. "The Lacuna" fills a lacuna with
powerfully imagined social history.
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