I have just, with sadness and sighs, turned the last few pages of Barbara Kingsolver‘s new wonder: The Lacuna. I was toward the last third of this awe inspiring novel when I realized the powerful comparison between this masterpiece and John Irving’s new novel, Last Night in Twisted River, which I finished about three weeks ago. The protagonists, both young males, whom the reader watches as they grow from childhood to adulthood, suffer from the lack of a normal loving home environment. And both of these protagonists find their way through life by authoring novels. As a reader, to watch the lifetime of a character beginning at age 12 through his last breath of life gives a sense of fulfillment and completion. Only talents such as Irving and Kingsolver can make this endeavor work and not cause the reader to lose interest. To call both The Lacuna and Last Night in Twisted River epics would be one way to describe the compelling protagonists’ journeys.
Having long been a fan of Kingsolver, I have read with great enjoyment for over two decades Pigs in Heaven, Animal Dreams, The Bean Trees, and The Poisonwood Bible. Last year I read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, Kingsolver’s non-fiction all encompassing look at her family’s successful experiment with living a year off of their Appalachian land and not purchasing anything that their local farmers did not grow. To say that I am a fan of Barbara Kingsolver is an understatement.
I will put it on record here that I believe The Lacuna to be her best work of fiction to date, and I am eagerly awaiting the announcement of a major nomination for a major book award in 2010!
Set both in Mexico and the United States in the first half of the 20th century, The Lacuna first creates interest simply because of its unusual title. Even taking a look at the Aztec-like book cover and jacket sparks interest. Having endless metaphorical meanings, a lacuna, by dictionary standards, is “a small blank or empty space.” In this novel, levels upon levels of the meaning of “lacuna” make their way to the surface as the novel rolls along in two very diverse countries.
Initially, the reader realizes that the psychological blank or hole created in the 12-year-old protagonist Harrison Shepherd’s life originated in the lack of a loving home due to the fact that his narcissistic Mexican mother pulled him back to Mexico from his known home in the U.S. and from his father who could not care less about his son’s departure from his life. His entirely selfish and immature mother pulls him along with her from lover to lover as he learns what he knows about life from Mexican kitchen personnel in deplorable environments. He often escapes to the ocean where he feels freedom with the fish in underwater caves.
Deprived of formal education, the very intelligent young boy gleans his knowledge from books he devours and from the common people in his world. After his mother’s death, Shepherd eventually lands in the households of radical thinkers, including exiled Russian Lev Trotsky, Communist Diego Rivera, and famous artist Frida Kahlo. Rotating from jobs ranging from kitchen pastry maker, to secretary, to plaster mixer, the twenty-year-old is thrown into a mix of violent international politics which eventually leads him back to the United States where he learns his estranged father has died.
The last third of the book focuses on Shepherd, the parentless, but hugely successful novelist, who has kept life-long journals, who is kindly befriended by an antiquated but loving older widowed stenograher who gives him the only true love he has ever known. The reader watches with anquish as Shepherd is called before the Committee of Un-American Activitists, who is comprised of actual historical figures, including Richard Nixon, because of this author’s employment in questionable Mexican households. In the end, the reader will be startled and amazed as Shepherd is theoritically, but erroneously categorized as a Communist .
If it were not for the loyalty and “parent type” love of Mrs. Brown, the stenographer, and his rational thinking attorney, Arthur Gold, the vulnernable, honest, and innocent protagonist would not survive. Heaped with American potitics surrounding the aftermath of WWII and names such as J. Edgar Hoover, President Truman, and McCarthy, The Lacuna offers a close up look at the volatile times of the late 1940s and early 1950s. In the end, Kingsolver touches the reader with a piercing look at what happens to a man when he is left parentless, countryless, and hopeless and when he is stripped of his soul’s means of expressing himself and can no longer write, his only way to “stay alive”. A mesmerizing and unexpected end point to another lacuna which the reader will not truly discover until the last ten pages of this complicated, but poignantly rich novel.
Stenographer Mrs. Brown notes toward the end of the novel, “He’d been called names before,and borne it. But when a man’s words are taken from him and poisoned, it’s the same as poisoning the man. He could not speak, for how his own tongue would be fouled. Words were his all. I felt I’d witnessed a murder, just as he’d seen his friend murdered in Mexico. Only the time they left the body living.”
The Lacuna, perhaps my last novel to read in 2009, takes its place on the top rungs of the most powerful novels I have read this year. To compare the protagonist in The Lacuna to the protagonist in Last Night in Twisted River gives a reader pause. It was by pure coincidence, but my gain, that I read these noteworthy novels back to back. In the end, I feel, it is always character development which makes reading worthwhile and enjoyable.
-Nan
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