The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

[Rob Neufeld]

Barbara Kingsolver reveals big, timely—partly local—novel on Asheville visit

by Rob Neufeld

Read interview with Barbara Kingsolver.
Hear audio from Oct. 15, 2009 interview.

Barbara Kingsolver, author of “The Poisonwood Bible” and other literary sensations, presents her long-anticipated new novel, “The Lacuna,” Nov. 2 in the Asheville High School Auditorium. “The Lacuna” inhabits four different worlds—two in Mexico, one in D.C., and one in Asheville—as its hero, Will Shepherd, proceeds toward his larger-than-life fate.

The novel first dives into Will’s boyhood home, a Mexican island to which his mother has gone with its owner, her boyfriend. It is here that Will begins the journal-writing that forms this novel, and discovers the underwater tunnel that leads to “the lacuna,” a Shangri-la.

After three bleak years in a boys’ academy in D.C., Will returns to Mexico and becomes immersed in the worlds of Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and Lev Trotsky. Mid-novel, a crisis sends Will back to the States, where he eventually follows the Blue Ridge Parkway to Asheville, his new home. The McCarthy Era arrives and extends its pall.

The genesis of the novel

“I decided to write this book in the winter of 2001-2002,” Kingsolver said in an interview with the Citizen-Times, “that very dark winter after the terrorist attacks of September 11, when I saw the national mood fall back to a hard-line position of, ‘We do not question ourselves.’”

“It was seven years exactly in the writing,” she continued, “and it was entirely under the Bush administration…I was just finishing up the final draft at the (time of the Obama) inauguration…The whole time I was writing it, I was thinking about censorship—the political and artistic censorship of the late 40s and early 50s—and how close we have come to those censorious times.”

Raising the stakes

Creating a novel, Kingsolver says, “I begin with theme. I think about what it is I want my readers to know or to examine…I don’t mean plot, but I mean big ideas.”

The big idea in “The Lacuna” is how cultures sometimes develop dark moods and repress anything considered challenging, including good art. The theme took Kingsolver to Mexico, near which she’d lived for twenty years, and to the art world of Diego Rivera, hero of the Mexican Revolution.

Rivera led Kingsolver to Lev Trotsky, Stalin’s democratic enemy, whom Rivera provided refuge—and, of course, to Frida Kahlo, Rivera’s wife, a trailblazer of native symbolism. Frida opened a new character for Kingsolver, and grew to become an integral person in Will’s life as well as a Frida unlike any portrayed elsewhere.

The emergence of Frida

When Will first met Frida, he was a plaster mixer for Rivera. He dutifully reported his formal name, Harrison Shepherd.

“XARrizZON!” Frida exclaims. “It sounds like strangling. What kind of a name is that?”

“It was a president, señora.”

“Of what? Some place where they don’t have any oxygen?”

Later, at a historic site, Frida’s character crosses the line from colorful celebrity to exposed soul and story heart.

“When I went to Mexico City on my first research trip, and walked around Diego’s and Frida’s houses,” Kingsolver said in the interview, “what I saw was that Frida…left her fingerprints everywhere…She was so vivid in the way she lived her life… that I realized she would give me access to another kind of story line.”

How Frida distracted the paparazzi of her day—the howlers in Kingsolver’s Mexican jungle mythology—casts a light on public opinion. “That fascinated me,” Kingsolver continued, “and I found that she and my protagonist had great chemistry because they are very similar in a certain way. They both are hiding what they consider to be enormous flaws.”

One of many satisfactions

One of the things that swamped me with surprise and delight in “The Lacuna” was the multiple transformations of Will’s character. Kingsolver worked hard at keeping the pronoun, “I,” out of Will’s account. He becomes a nobody, except for the fiction he pens about Aztec history.

A mid-novel passage left me wondering where the plot was going, because it had become mundane for thirty pages. Subsequent events made me realize that the passage was Will’s tunnel period—he was holding his breath—and all the elements of his life would gain significance as he completed his pilgrim’s progress.

At his right hand in his Asheville years is Mrs. Violet Brown, who had left the mountains for the city twenty years earlier, and came to play a key role in Harrison’s Shepherd’s destiny. Local readers will enjoy glimpsing certain social scenes in post-WWII Asheville, but it is Mrs. Brown’s character and background that are the major contribution to southern Appalachian literature.

I could read “The Lacuna” a second time and enjoy its dozens of features, one of which is Kingsolver’s skill at drawing the reader in.

BOOK REVIEWED
The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver (HarperCollins hardcover, Oct. 2009, 515 pages, $26.99)

EVENT
• Barbara Kingsolver presents her novel, “The Lacuna,” and speaks in Asheville High School’s auditorium, 419 McDowell Street, 7 p.m., Mon., Nov 2. One ticket is complimentary with each pre-purchase of “The Lacuna” from Malaprop's Bookstore/Café. For more information, call 1-800-441-9829.

[Bill Branyon]

Hi
I'd read your review in the Citizen, and now see it was more interesting than I'd already concluded, after listening to Kingsolver at AHS. Wow. All she said was amazing. I managed to get her my latest novel. Though she seemed zonked after signing a thousand books. She's so healthy for a writer. sort of demystifies the whole process, removing it from decadent, suffering TB afflicted authors to healthy mother who enjoys the interplay of dialogue - which is, in it's simplest form, prose with quotation marks around it.
Sorry i didn't get to talk to you there.
B