Review of The Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver, Faber & Faber 2009
If you've had enough of contemporary novels about nothing that matters very much, with tedious or dislikeable protagonists you wouldn't care if you never met again, with posturing authors anxious to show off their stylistic brilliance at every opportunity instead of getting on with the story and, above all, novels that don't so much end as peter unsatisfyingly out along with the author's ideas and impetus, I suggest you try this one a.s.a.p. and don't be daunted by its doorstep size. The intrinsic interest of the story and its two main narrative voices is such that on a first read you won't even be conscious of time passing, much less of the stunningly artful structure that underpins it.
What we read is a collection of notebooks and associated documents, collated by Violet Brown, amanuensis to Harrison Shepherd, novelist, and stored by her in 1958 for 50 years. She does this because she is incensed at how her employer was misrepresented in his lifetime and wants to put the record straight for the future. Harrison, born in 1916, is half-American and half-Mexican; brought up partly in both countries, his life meshes with the class struggle of the twenties and thirties. His childhood is spent in a Mexico constantly lurching from revolution to reaction and back; as a teenager in the US, he witnesses the massacre by bayonets, bullets and gas of the Bonus Army encampment of Great War veterans protesting about their missing war bonuses, and how the press misinforms people about what happened. Later, back in Mexico, he joins the chaotic household of artist-politician Diego Rivera and painter Frida Kahlo, which is how he comes to know Lev Trotsky and witness his murder - again massively misrepresented by the press in America, where at the time the government was anxious to be on good terms with Stalin. Traumatised by this event, he returns to the US in the 40s and becomes a successful postwar novelist. But as the US becomes more insular and paranoid, his leftwing past becomes a problem.
Misrepresentation of the truth is a major motif, as in this key conversation between Violet and Harrison when she warns him that reporters take his reticence as a licence to make up what he won't tell them:
"When they have nothing, they fill in. If you don't stop them, they fill in more. It's like you've agreed to it. To their way of thinking, saying nothing is the same as agreeing. […] and taking the Fifth means you're guilty."
"Whatever they may think, it does not. A blank space on a form, the missing page, a hole in your knowledge of something – it's still some real thing. It exists. You don't get to fill it in with whatever you want".
A running joke about Harrison's writing – and he is a dry, witty and attractive narrative voice – is that his publisher will never agree to his proposed titles, always substituting something more commercial which, to the author's mind, says less about the book. Kingsolver clearly would not have been willing to negotiate about "The Lacuna" as a title; it is crucial, as that conversation shows. "Lacuna" has several meanings, including a geographical one vital to the novel's structure, but the literary meaning is a gap in a documentary record. In Harrison's notebooks there are two lacunae, two missing books. One is burned, unread, by Violet on his orders. It's possible, from hints in other notebooks, to make a fair guess at what it contained, but Violet, mindful of his insistence that people cannot be completely known, avoids doing so. The other book, from Harrison's childhood, goes accidentally missing for years; he himself in fact never recovers it. But it resurfaces later, to be collated in its chronological order with the rest by Violet, with an archivist's proper explanatory note on the circumstances. This book, therefore, is never a lacuna to the reader but only to her; when it is found, many things she had not understood become clear to her.
Violet's narrative voice is as engaging as Harrison's, for her humour, her archaic mountain idiom and her intellectual and moral rigour. When an exhibition of abstract art falls foul of an increasingly insular Congress, Harrison's explanation is "it made them uneasy". But Violet's logic is more forensic, and more uncompromising: "They didn't say uneasy. They said un-American. I can't see that. If an American paints it, then it's American, isn't it?"
If a Great American Novel is meant to show how America became what it is, then this is it. It's also a lot more, a highly entertaining, thoughtful, beautifully structured narrative. Above all, it has, as so many novels do not, a truly strong, satisfying ending, that comes organically from the book, is totally right for it and yet still managed to take me by surprise. A genuinely worthwhile experience.
What we read is a collection of notebooks and associated documents, collated by Violet Brown, amanuensis to Harrison Shepherd, novelist, and stored by her in 1958 for 50 years. She does this because she is incensed at how her employer was misrepresented in his lifetime and wants to put the record straight for the future. Harrison, born in 1916, is half-American and half-Mexican; brought up partly in both countries, his life meshes with the class struggle of the twenties and thirties. His childhood is spent in a Mexico constantly lurching from revolution to reaction and back; as a teenager in the US, he witnesses the massacre by bayonets, bullets and gas of the Bonus Army encampment of Great War veterans protesting about their missing war bonuses, and how the press misinforms people about what happened. Later, back in Mexico, he joins the chaotic household of artist-politician Diego Rivera and painter Frida Kahlo, which is how he comes to know Lev Trotsky and witness his murder - again massively misrepresented by the press in America, where at the time the government was anxious to be on good terms with Stalin. Traumatised by this event, he returns to the US in the 40s and becomes a successful postwar novelist. But as the US becomes more insular and paranoid, his leftwing past becomes a problem.
Misrepresentation of the truth is a major motif, as in this key conversation between Violet and Harrison when she warns him that reporters take his reticence as a licence to make up what he won't tell them:
"When they have nothing, they fill in. If you don't stop them, they fill in more. It's like you've agreed to it. To their way of thinking, saying nothing is the same as agreeing. […] and taking the Fifth means you're guilty."
"Whatever they may think, it does not. A blank space on a form, the missing page, a hole in your knowledge of something – it's still some real thing. It exists. You don't get to fill it in with whatever you want".
A running joke about Harrison's writing – and he is a dry, witty and attractive narrative voice – is that his publisher will never agree to his proposed titles, always substituting something more commercial which, to the author's mind, says less about the book. Kingsolver clearly would not have been willing to negotiate about "The Lacuna" as a title; it is crucial, as that conversation shows. "Lacuna" has several meanings, including a geographical one vital to the novel's structure, but the literary meaning is a gap in a documentary record. In Harrison's notebooks there are two lacunae, two missing books. One is burned, unread, by Violet on his orders. It's possible, from hints in other notebooks, to make a fair guess at what it contained, but Violet, mindful of his insistence that people cannot be completely known, avoids doing so. The other book, from Harrison's childhood, goes accidentally missing for years; he himself in fact never recovers it. But it resurfaces later, to be collated in its chronological order with the rest by Violet, with an archivist's proper explanatory note on the circumstances. This book, therefore, is never a lacuna to the reader but only to her; when it is found, many things she had not understood become clear to her.
Violet's narrative voice is as engaging as Harrison's, for her humour, her archaic mountain idiom and her intellectual and moral rigour. When an exhibition of abstract art falls foul of an increasingly insular Congress, Harrison's explanation is "it made them uneasy". But Violet's logic is more forensic, and more uncompromising: "They didn't say uneasy. They said un-American. I can't see that. If an American paints it, then it's American, isn't it?"
If a Great American Novel is meant to show how America became what it is, then this is it. It's also a lot more, a highly entertaining, thoughtful, beautifully structured narrative. Above all, it has, as so many novels do not, a truly strong, satisfying ending, that comes organically from the book, is totally right for it and yet still managed to take me by surprise. A genuinely worthwhile experience.
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