The Lacuna

The only previous work I've read by Barbara Kingsolver before The Lacuna was her novel Pigs in Heaven, which I found to be thoroughly delightful and heartfelt. This novel is strikingly different in tone, and it's a testament to her abilities that she could write a book so different. The differences, though, are not entirely in the positive ledger. The Lacuna is a book strangely lacking in emotion.

A lacuna is a gap in something, whether it be in a shoreline (the word shares an etymology with lagoon) an archive, or even in memory. All of these definitions are explored in the book, which is the story of Harrison Shepherd. He is the son of an American man, who he meets only occasionally, and a Mexican mother, who takes him to her country as a youth, where she will latch on to a series of men. The first section of the book describes his experiences as a boy on an island, where he is haunted by the screams of howler monkeys and tantalized by an underwater cave.

Shepherd will go on to become a cook and all-around assistant to the famous muralist Diego Rivera and his wife, Frida Kahlo. In turn, he will befriend and work as a secretary for Leon Trotsky, the exiled Soviet leader. This is the best section of the book, as the large personalities of these three dominate (it also reminded me of Julie Taymor's film, Frida). After Trotsky's assassination, Shepherd moves to Asheville, North Carolina, and becomes a popular writer of novels set in ancient Mexico. His associations with the aforementioned well-known Communists, though, gets him trouble during the witch-hunting days of the McCarthy era.

The book is a patchwork of different styles--mostly journal entries by Shepherd, or his secretary during his North Carolina days, the redoubtable widow, Violet Brown, or letters written by and to Shepherd. But the huge problem of the book, it's own lacuna, so to speak, is that Shepherd is an undefined character. He's kind of a Zelig, a cypher who pales in comparison to the larger-than-life people around him. He is also incredibly passive--during the latter part of the book, when he is under attack by the FBI and other anti-Communist organizations, he mounts no defense of himself. He is also gay, but this is slipped into the plot so quietly that it really doesn't matter. I was stunned to read this passage, which is toward the end of the book: "What was my childhood disease? Love, I suppose. I was susceptible to contracting great love, suffering the chills and delirium of that pox." Really? Either he is a self-deluded character or I was reading a different book.