Later, as a young adult living back in the States, Harrison is targeted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities because of his past association with revolutionaries. When he runs into the artist Frida Kahlo at the local market, Harrison goes home with her and puts his dough-rolling skills to use by mixing plaster for Kahlo's husband, the muralist Diego Rivera.Įventually, Lev 'Leon' Trotsky moves into the household, and Harrison becomes his secretary as well as a witness to Trotsky's assassination by one of Stalin's agents. Adrift, Harrison spends his days swimming and learning how to cook from the kitchen staff. In 1929, when Harrison is 12 years old, his mother snags a big Mexican landowner, and she takes her son to live on her lover's estate. to a dim American father and a firecracker of a Mexican mother who is eternally on the prowl for a richer husband. The passive Harrison was born in the U.S. But most people won't even stand close to the blade.

A few people are hard enough to bend its edge. As he tells a friend late in the novel, 'What we end up calling history is a kind of knife, slicing down through time. Our hero, Harrison Shepherd, is an accidental onlooker to history buffeted by other people's plans and passions.

The motif of the crucial missing piece runs throughout the novel, but the thing unintentionally missing here is an engaging main character. 'Lacuna' refers to a gap or something that's absent. In fact, as a piece of historical fiction, it has a lot in common with those conventional works of genre fiction that Amazon and the big box stores are hawking at cut-rate bargain prices.Ī serious problem with The Lacuna is telegraphed in its striking title.

I wish I could say she also deserves kudos for writing a spectacular work of fiction, but to tell you the truth, it's just - at best - so-so. Kingsolver deserves kudos, if only because she seems to be single-handedly keeping consumer zest alive for the literary novel. The Lacuna is the only literary novel caught in the cross hairs of this sales skirmish. Almost all of the blockbuster books in question are works of genre fiction - suspense and horror stories by the likes of James Patterson, Stephen King, Dean Koontz and John Grisham. Wal-Mart, Amazon and Target are engaged in a price war against booksellers over the hot late fall/early winter releases. Interest in it is unusually fierce for a work of literary fiction. The Lacuna is Barbara Kingsolver's first new novel in nine years. Barbara Kingsolver is an author, a poet and the creator of the Bellwether Prize for 'literature of social change.'

Kingsolver the lacuna