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decemberthirty) wrote2011-01-17 05:32 pm
decemberthirty) wrote2011-01-17 05:32 pm
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I finished Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna over the weekend, my first book of the new year. This morning I sat down and made three different starts to this review, none of which seemed right. So I'll try again. Perhaps this is fitting; the book took some time to get off the ground as well.
The Lacuna is written as a pastiche, an assemblage of journal entries, correspondence, and newspaper clippings that tell the story of Harrison Shepherd. The book (and Shepherd's life) splits into halves as easily as a peeled orange. The first half is Mexico: color, adventure, drama, close friendships with famous personages--Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Leon Trotsky. The second half is Asheville, North Carolina: a quiet house, work and reclusivity, Shepherd and his secretary Violet Brown. Although the first half would seem to be more exciting, it was the second half that captivated me. In the first half, Shepherd himself was a lacuna, seeming always to efface himself from his own record of his own life. I wanted more of him, and less of the famous people around him, whose stories are already so well-known. I got what I wanted later on, after Shepherd has moved to North Carolina and (perhaps because he has become a writer?) Kingsolver allows his personal writings to become more reflective.
This is a book with some historical sweep to it, and it suffers a bit from the same flaw as A.S. Byatt's vast The Children's Book. Like Byatt, Kingsolver seems to feel compelled to include every historical and cultural development that occurred in the lifetime of her character. At times, this feels like a bit much, especially since her handling of the politics of the period is not exactly nuanced. In fact, the only times I got annoyed at Kingsolver's prose (which is mostly quite lovely) were when any two characters discussed politics together. Suddenly it was all ham-fisted dialogue and simplified moralizing!
The book also suffers from what George Saunders calls a "moment of avoidance," and I think it's a big one. Kingsolver leads us right up to Shepherd's first sexual relationship, with a classmate named Billy Boorzai, but the meat of that relationship turns out to be in the only journal in Shepherd's life that was destroyed. It's clear that the experience is major to Shepherd, and that what happens to him and to Billy Boorzai is important to his later development, but we don't get to see any of it. We come to the brink, and then skip forward to a man who spends the rest of his adult life living in near-celibacy. It's not that I can't make guesses and fill in some of the blanks, but I find myself wanting to tell Kingsolver what George Saunders told me about my moments of avoidance: "lean into the action."
So The Lacuna has flaws. Still, I liked Harrison Shepherd enough to make me like the whole book. I liked his reticence, and his deep yearnings, and the way he (almost) always kept those yearnings to himself. I wanted happiness for him, though he never seemed quite capable of getting it. He joins the long list of literary characters that I want to invite over for tea, and protect from all the bad things in the world.
The Lacuna is written as a pastiche, an assemblage of journal entries, correspondence, and newspaper clippings that tell the story of Harrison Shepherd. The book (and Shepherd's life) splits into halves as easily as a peeled orange. The first half is Mexico: color, adventure, drama, close friendships with famous personages--Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Leon Trotsky. The second half is Asheville, North Carolina: a quiet house, work and reclusivity, Shepherd and his secretary Violet Brown. Although the first half would seem to be more exciting, it was the second half that captivated me. In the first half, Shepherd himself was a lacuna, seeming always to efface himself from his own record of his own life. I wanted more of him, and less of the famous people around him, whose stories are already so well-known. I got what I wanted later on, after Shepherd has moved to North Carolina and (perhaps because he has become a writer?) Kingsolver allows his personal writings to become more reflective.
This is a book with some historical sweep to it, and it suffers a bit from the same flaw as A.S. Byatt's vast The Children's Book. Like Byatt, Kingsolver seems to feel compelled to include every historical and cultural development that occurred in the lifetime of her character. At times, this feels like a bit much, especially since her handling of the politics of the period is not exactly nuanced. In fact, the only times I got annoyed at Kingsolver's prose (which is mostly quite lovely) were when any two characters discussed politics together. Suddenly it was all ham-fisted dialogue and simplified moralizing!
The book also suffers from what George Saunders calls a "moment of avoidance," and I think it's a big one. Kingsolver leads us right up to Shepherd's first sexual relationship, with a classmate named Billy Boorzai, but the meat of that relationship turns out to be in the only journal in Shepherd's life that was destroyed. It's clear that the experience is major to Shepherd, and that what happens to him and to Billy Boorzai is important to his later development, but we don't get to see any of it. We come to the brink, and then skip forward to a man who spends the rest of his adult life living in near-celibacy. It's not that I can't make guesses and fill in some of the blanks, but I find myself wanting to tell Kingsolver what George Saunders told me about my moments of avoidance: "lean into the action."
So The Lacuna has flaws. Still, I liked Harrison Shepherd enough to make me like the whole book. I liked his reticence, and his deep yearnings, and the way he (almost) always kept those yearnings to himself. I wanted happiness for him, though he never seemed quite capable of getting it. He joins the long list of literary characters that I want to invite over for tea, and protect from all the bad things in the world.
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I do love books which tell the story through a variety of sources though (for example Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' is a real favourite)
It started slowly for me, too. The scenes with his mother dragged, I found. I did love the scenes with Frida, though, they were so vibrant. I remember reading an interview with Barbara Kingsolver and she said that she hadn't even intended for Frida to be a presence in the book, but she had wormed her way in!
Being British, I had never really realised the scale of the McCarthy trials before, so I feel like I've learned something :)
I absolutely LOVED the cover too, I couldn't stop looking at it. this was on the UK version (http://images.smh.com.au/ftsmh/ffximage/2009/11/30/lacuna_narrowweb__300x448,0.jpg), was yours the same?
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Have you read The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins? That was the first thing that leapt to mind when you mentioned loving stories that are told through a variety of sources. You may enjoy it, if you haven't read it already.
I hadn't heard Kingsolver's comment about Frida before--very interesting. There's a certain bravado in turning such a well known figure into a fictional character, so it's intriguing to think that Kingsolver's didn't plan to do it from the beginning. Would have been quite a different book without Kahlo's presence!
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I agree about the bravado, and to use someone so recent as well, who some people would have a living memory of. I'm sure I've blathered on about Wolf Hall to you already, but Hilary Mantel was very brave in what she did with Thomas Cromwell, although this was safer as we are such a distance from those events and have much less record of them. (oh god HURRY with the sequel, Hilary!)
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Nor have I read Wolf Hall, but apparently I should as you're the third person to mention it to me in the past few weeks. I recently "finished" a story I've been working on that features a few real people as characters, and it made me terribly nervous. And in my story, all of the real people were just minor characters alongside the fictional main characters, yet I was still paralyzed by the thought of getting them wrong. I don't know that I could ever include a historical figure as a central character in anything I write.
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I know what you mean, and seeing as Barbara Kingsolver took 7 years to write the Lacuna, and Hilary Mantel took 5 years for Wolf Hall (after 20 years of thinking about it!) they obviously struggled with the same thing!