Odd Tale
The Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver, 2009
The latest from Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible, Pigs in Heaven) is a strange one and has been met with mixed reviews. This reader liked it.
It is set in the time period from 1929 to 1951 and Kingsolver’s primary objective seems to have been to focus on significant events of the period; the great depression, war, the cold war and communist witch hunt; from a purely personal point of view namely through the life of the protagonist; a young man, Harrison William Shepherd, whose father is a Washington DC government bean counter and whose mother is the daughter of a Mexican bureaucrat (without an ounce of Indian blood) who married Shepherd as a young teenager against her parent’s will. The novel form is a little hard to make out but seems to be a biography of Shepherd based on diaries and letters and pulled together by mysterious archivist VB.
Tajin Pyramid near Veracruz
The story begins with the divorce of his parents when Shepherd is 12 and his mother returns to Mexico with her new lover, Enrique, a Mexican diplomat and owner of a Hacienda on Isla Pixol a small island north of Veracruz. The island has no school but Enrique loans the boy a few books at a time, mostly European classics, from his personal and locked library. Shepherd reads whatever Enrique chooses. The books include a few on Mexican history and young Shepherd develops a passion for Mexico’s great past civilizations. Shepherd’s mother buys the boy a leather bound diary and Shepherd begins his lifelong habit of keeping a diary.
Life on the island isn’t bad since a young cook takes him under his wing, teaching him to cook, and giving him his dead brother’s hand made diving mask. Shepherd becomes a proficient swimmer and diver and loves to explore an isolated cove where he discovers an underwater cave,a Lacuna. At low tide, during a full moon, the mouth of the cave is exposed and it is possible for Shepherd to enter and explore the cave. He can see light ahead and sets a goal of becoming strong enough to swim to where the light is. In his explorations he finds stone carvings and human bones and imagines that the Indians stored secret treasures in the cave when the Spanish arrived.
Shepherd’s mother tires of the stingy Enrique and runs away to Mexico City with a wealthy, married, businessman who promises her a place of her own and school for her son. Shepherd discovers the great Aztec ruins of Mexico City. Shepherd cannot pass the entrance exams for the better schools and is finally sent to a Catholic run school for misfits and delinquents.
Bonus Army Camp and Col. Pattan’s attack force
Bonus Army Camp burns with Capital in background
His mother convinces his father to put Shepherd in a good American school and packs him off alone by train back to DC. His father, the bean counter, arranges a place in a boarding school where he abandons him. Shepherd and one other student, an orphan and street smart bully are the only two students who live at the school year round. The two boys spend time on the DC Mall where one of the largest Hoovervilles has grown with tents everywhere and people are living in abandoned warehouses. On one occasion WWI veterans stage a protest demonstration because the government has failed to pay their promised pensions and Hoover sends the army (Gen. MacArthur and Col. Patton) to break up the protest. They use horses, tanks, and tear gas, trampling many and accidentally setting fire to some warehouses.
Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo
Diego Rivera Mexico City Mural
The story suddenly jumps a couple of years ahead and VB explains that a diary for those years is missing. We move to 1935 and find ourselves again in Mexico city. Shepherd is 18 and looking for work in a world without jobs. One day he sees an Aztec queen in the market followed by her slave carrying a bamboo bird cage on her head. The queen is buying birds from the market. Shepherd also goes to the city hall where he sees a mural in progress depicting the history of Mexico. On another day Shepherd again sees the Aztec queen in the market alone and offers to help carry her purchases home. The home is a bright blue house with a fabulous garden; Shepherd has met the painters Frida Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera. He goes to work in their kitchen. Shortly after, Diego prepares to receive special guests by turning the blue house into a fortress. A Russian peasant couple show up; it is Lev Davidovich Trotsky and his wife. Shepherd knows how to type and becomes a second secretary to Trotsky. This appears a little over the top but somehow works.
Lev Davidovich Trosky and Natalya
Shepherd has also been secretly writing his own novel, a story of Cortez and Moctezuma, known only to Frida. Shepherd’s mother dies suddenly in a car accident while racing with her reporter boy friend to catch sight of Howard Hughes landing at a nearby airfield.
Trotsky is brutally murdered while Shepherd is in the house and the police arrive to take away all of Shepherd’s personal things including his novel and diaries. Frida goes to the police and manages to retrieve his clothes and other items and convinces Shepherd it is time for him to return to Gringolandia (America). She needs to ship her paintings to Peggy Guggenheim’s NY Gallery and sends Shepherd as her shipping agent. She gives him an extra crate which contains a small painting, a gift for Shepherd. After delivering the paintings, Shepherd returns to DC to discover his father has died leaving him a small amount of money and a nearly new white Chevy coupe. Orphan Shepherd drives out the new Blue ridge mountain federal highway until it ends in Asheville NC. He takes a room in a boarding house and gets a job. It is now 1940.
1939 Chevy Coupe
When the war starts Shepherd, who has been blue carded, (he has the wrong sexual preferences) is recruited by the Civilian service to help ship national treasures from DC to Asheville for safe keeping. In 1943 he finally opens Frida’s gift crate. The sketch it contains is not packed in the usual straw but in crumpled up paper and he discovers that Frida has managed to retrieve all his novel and diaries from the police and has hidden them as packing material in the crate. Shepherd immediately buys a typewriter and starts turning the pages into a manuscript. It is published, critically acclaimed, and suddenly Shepherd is famous and has money. He buys a small craftsmen s cottage and sets to work on his second novel. He is overwhelmed with mail and decides to hire a stenographer.
Appalachian Family
Violet Brown (VB) shows up for the interview and he realizes they lived for years in the same boarding house. VB is a widow, 17 years older than Shepherd. Her people have lived in the mountains a day’s drive from Asheville for hundreds of years and she is the only member of her family ever to have escaped the mountains (to Asheville). She reads widely and follows the National Geographic magazine, dreaming of trips she never expects to make. She speaks an idiom that would have been familiar to Shakespeare. She is unshakable and practical and was able to handle the army bureaucracy effortlessly as a secretary during the war. Shepherd hires her and she not only organizes his correspondence and novel drafts, but helps him deal with his new found fame getting him out of the house to mix with the town. The Asheville of this novel is the Ashville of Thomas Wolfe whose tell-all first novel exposed to town to scandal that forced Wolfe to move to NYC. (not to be confused with white suited Tom Wolfe) There is no mention here of Black Mountain College, famous after the war for the works of John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, or Merce Cunningham, who formed the cultural avant garde of the era.
The war ends and his second novel is published to even greater acclaim. He needs to hire a lawyer to negotiate the movie rights. He takes VB to DC to view a contemporary art exhibit the State Department wants to use to show the Europeans that American culture is more than Norman Rockwell. It is VBs first trip out of the county. Congress hates the show and kills the idea of touring the exhibit.
Shepherd decides to set his next novel in the Yucatan dealing with the decline of Mayan culture. He and VB spend two months in Mexico researching his subject. They return to Asheville to the inevitable rumors that they are romantically involved.
The last third of Lacuna deals with the post war Red scare and the communist witch hunts. Guess who is one of the victims. None other than gay, half Mexican friend of famous communists Frida and Diego, and former personal secretary to Bolshevik founder Trotsky himself.
Shepherd consults his lawyer and has VB burn all his diaries and letters, particularly those from/to Frida and Diego. Shepherd is hauled before Congress and it is all but certain he will be arrested. Before that happens he and VB make a final trip to Mexico (using assumed names), back to Isla Pixol. On the full moon at low tide with VB and other island children as witnesses Shepherd, who has been training in an Asheville pool, dives into his boyhood cove and vanishes. He is 34 years old. His body is never recovered. You can guess how VB managed to create this book from all the “burned” material.