Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver

My review of Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel (Faber) appears in today’s Sunday Business Post Magazine. Here’s a short excerpt:

Unsheltered’s turgidity derives in large part from Kingsolver’s prose, which is a hideous blend of folksy sentiment and ersatz formality. Try this: “In her family, in her profession and her husband’s, in strained European economies and the whole damned world, where is the cash that once there was?” (Linguistic contortions aside, what kind of magazine editor knows nothing about the state of the world economy?) There’s also a fair admixture of waffle. Here’s Thatcher, arriving home to find his wife Rose in the parlour: “Alone, he was relieved to see. Not with her mother on the sofa parsing threads of gossip, both ready to drop their needlework and turn up their eyes with bottomless female expectation.”

Those last three words are echt Kingsolver. What the hell is female (as opposed to male) expectation? Whatever its putative sex, can expectation ever be “bottomless”? Or try this: “Unbustled and unbonneted like this, Rose was a gravitational body that drew his front against her back, his bearded jaw against her tidy zenith.” Her tidy zenith! What a phrase!