The Lacuna: Barbara Kingsolver

This is going to be less of a review and more of a puzzled ‘how did this beat Wolf Hall most-awesome-of-all-awesome-books to the Orange Prize?’

Harrison Shepherd is half Mexican, half American, growing up in the 1920′s.  He spends his childhood with his wayward mother, attends military school in Virginia, works as a cook for Diego Riveria, a confidante for Frida Kahlo, and a secretary for Lev Trotsky, before moving to South Carolina and becoming an author.  His life takes place against the backdrop of the great 20th century social struggles: the Depression, the rise of socialism, the rise of Stalinism, the rise of fascism, the Cold War and McCarthyite hysteria.  He’s a witness to all of this and yet all he wants is to be an invisible writer with a real home. 

Don’t get me wrong.  In many ways The Lacuna is breathtaking.  It is better than 90 % of the books you will read this year.  You know how I feel about sacriligious usage of real people in rubbishy historical fiction, but this Kahlo and this Trotsky in particular are sympathetic and compelling.  Violet Brown, Shepherd’s stenographer, was terrific: exactly the sort of woman who seems all prim and proper but who is deeply moral and righteous and passionate and non-judgemental.   And Kingsolver is extremely good on lies, damned lies and journalism: the papers making up exactly whatever they please and not caring either about the truth or who they hurt.   

But it’s not a masterpiece.  In fact, given all the wonderful things about it, I can’t decide why I don’t like it more than I do.

Partly, I think because there is just too much stuffed in.  Yes, Japanese internment, the madness of Zelda Fitzgerald and the abuses of WWI veterans at Hooverville were horrific.  But do they ALL need to be included?  It sometimes reads like a canter through important-and-worthy-social-historical-issues-of-our-time, and that holds the story up. 

Partly, though the writing is beautifully crafted and lyrical, it could have been much more sparing.  No metaphor is left out, no elegant phrase omitted.  The words keep coming and coming and coming while the plot staggers around.  Tell me a story please, and get on with it.  One of Harrison’s great principles is that very often silence is better than speech.  Barbara Kingsolver would have been well advised to apply her own lesson.

Partly, because the dialogue is too often used to make rhetorical points, rather than to show two people in conversation.  Violet and Harrison, towards the end, become puppets using platitudes far too frequently.    

And partly, I think it’s because Harrison himself is such a blank person.  Compared with the complexity of Cromwell in Wolf Hall, he’s a generic heroic protagonist.

So all in all, it’s great; but it could have been two hundred pages shorter and much greater.