For the Reading List

The settings of Barbara Kingsolver’s latest novel, The Lacuna, seem so unlikely: the Yucatán Peninsula and México City, and then Asheville, North Carolina, in the 1930s and 1940s. The main character, Harrison Shepherd, is the son of an American bureaucrat in Washington, D.C., and a Mexican mother who takes her son and leaves her husband to return with another man to México. Harrison has a solitary childhood in the jungle on the ocean, and then, in México City as a young man, he finds himself working in the house of the artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, as their cook and plaster-mixer and secretary, at the time when they are secretly housing the Russian revolutionary Lev Trotsky. Later, Harrison returns to the U.S. and becomes an accomplished novelist, until he is victimized by McCarthyism, accused of being a communist and betraying his country with his novels. While Harrison is the focus of the story, he does not the narrate it; it is framed for us by his secretary, Violet Brown. And she tells us that an important segment of the manuscript is missing. We have to fill in the gaps.

Initially, I thought these disparate pieces could not hold together. But as often happens for me with Kingsolver’s novels, by the end, I was enamored of the characters (especially the figure of Frida Kahlo) and moved by the conflicts of the times in both the U.S. and México.

The novel focuses on liminal spaces and how people inhabit them – how people move between familiar and unfamiliar places and cultures; how people make sense of each other and form relationships when, as the fictionalized Frida Kahlo states in the novel, “The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don’t know.” The novel asks us to question how we approach “the thing we don’t know” – with fear, or with respect and a sense of wonder?

And I loved reading The Lacuna over the past weeks because of how it interfaced with my time here in México. I read about Frida Kahlo’s Coyoacán house in the novel, and then I walked through its rooms. I read about the main character, Harrison, mixing the plaster for Diego Rivera’s murals in the National Palace in México City, and then I saw the murals. I read about the cenotes on the Yucatán Peninsula, and then I looked into their depths around Tulum. The novel made me see more, and what I saw shaped how I read the novel. It was like swimming in a cenote, as Kingsolver describes it, moving between pools of experience that are separate but connected.