#2: The Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver

This was my first Barbara Kingsolver book and I liked The Lacuna well enough, but didn't love it. Still, I'm interested in reading more of her work because she conjures some amazing images with her prose - it's just that in this one, I didn't find the protagonist captivating enough.

The Lacuna centers around Harrison Shepherd, a gay writer who grows up with dual identities as a Mexican and an American. The book begins in his childhood, when his vain mother uproots him to follow her lover to Isla Pixol, Mexico. Harrison feels isolated on the tiny island but soon discovers the joys of snorkeling - and an opening in the coral, the titular lacuna, that leads to an archaeological ruin in a cenote. After a brief stint at a military boarding school in the States, he returns to Mexico and reconnects with artist Diego Rivera, whom he'd formerly mixed plaster for. In the most interesting part of the book, Harrison's fictional life becomes entwined with the real lives around him, those of Rivera, his wife Frida Kahlo, and their friend Leon Trotsky. But after things go horribly wrong, Harrison returns to the United States and settles in Asheville, North Carolina, where he becomes a famous writer...until McCarthy enters history. Harrison struggles with this until the end of the novel, when Kingsolver returns to the beginnings of the book with a poignant weaving together of the original pieces. The ending was incredible, although the images were perhaps a little overexplained (for readers who wouldn't get it?).

The book is 400-plus pages so it has a number of themes running through it, but I'd say it's primarily about the search for home and identity...and yet, Harrison Shepherd never finds his. He's a shadow figure when he's supposed to be the star of his own life; he never really comes to term with being gay, being an artist, or even being an American and/or a Mexican. Even though he becomes successful in his own right, it's like he never grows out of the feeling that he's just a servant or assistant. Harrison is completely defined by the people around him - and so is the book. Thus, The Lacuna is interesting when the people around him are interesting - his mother and her affairs, Leon Trotsky (who has perhaps the 20th-century's saddest story). But then when his companions, like Violet Brown, are meek or situations, like with Bulls-Eye, are implied, the book's momentum really slowed.

But still, it's a worthy read. Most interesting, I thought, were the parallels Kingsolver drew (intentionally, I think) between McCarthy's Communist witchhunts in the 1950s and the political landscape of today. Harrison Shepherd is ostracized because it's deemed that he's not American enough and those scenes really reminded me of the "un-American" rhetoric used in the last election by the Republic party, and specifically Sarah Palin.

As I mentioned up top, I found Kingsolver to be an incredible writer. I only wish someday I can conjure up half the wondrous images she does. Perhaps my favorite passage, from page 18:

“The hacienda had heavy doors and thick walls that stayed cool all day, and windows that let in the sound of the sea all night: hush, hush, like a heartbeat. He would grow thin as bones here, and when the books were all finished, he would starve. But no, now he would not. The notebook from the tobacco stand was the beginning of hope: a prisoner’s plan for escape. Its empty pages would be the book of everything, miraculous and unending like the sea at night, a heartbeat that never stops.”

Last but not least, I went to Mexico City in 2008 and visited a good number of the places mentioned in the book. Click here for the next post, featuring a small gallery of photos .