Book: The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

I will make only one disclaimer, before writing about how much I loved this book, and that is an admissmion that my dad is a Trotsky-phile and that I carry a bit of that tendency.  Since Trotsky is one of the main “characters” in Kingsolver’s latest novel,  it is important to put that out in the open.  

The Lacuna is a hybrid novel, told through journal entries, posthumous commentaries, newspaper clippings and senate hearing transcripts all from the files of the fictional Harrison Shepard, a Mexican-American man born in the United States in 1916. When he is twelve, Harrison’s mother leaves his father–a drudge worker in Washington, D.C., taking Harrison with her in a move back to Mexico. He stays there for the next few years, living first in a small village by the sea, and later in Mexico City where he begins to work for Diego Rivera as a plaster mixer. He then ends up working in the household of Rivera, becoming close friends with his wife, the artist Frida Kahlo. Later, when Lev (one of the leaders of the Russian Revolution of 1919 along with Lenin and Stalin) and Natalia Trotsky–exiled from everywhere else in the world after Stalin began his purge of anyone who resisted him-come to live in the Rivera/Kahlo household and then (after a fall-out with Rivera, partially due to Trotsky’s affair with Kahlo) move into their own home a couple of blocks away, Shepard goes to work for Trotsky as a cook and typist. While struggling to come to terms with his sexuality, he writes away in journals and begins work on his own novel, a secret life since he considers himself only a servant and at best, an observer of the greats. After Trotsky is assassinated, a heartbroken Shepard returns to the United States, where he establishes a career as a writer of “pot-boilers” based on Mexican history. I don’t want to give away too much of the ending, but Shepard does end up a victim of sorts of the McCarthy era, the communist witchhunts that Arther Miller captured in parable via the tragic and enraging “The Crucible.”

I loved this book for a few different reasons. First, I loved the way Kingsolver mixes form by collaging together different types of writing. I enjoyed the break from the journals into letters and newspaper articles. Second,  the extensive research the author must have done to write a book of this scope is what drives it. The attention to detail regarding Mexico City, Trotsky’s politics and life, the personality and passion of Frida Kahlo, and the maddening Alice in Wonderland nature of the destruction of the “red scare” era in America is all brought to life.  I’ve  read some about the McCarthy-era, but never realized the damage wrought on so many lives and careers post-WWII. I couldn’t help making a parallel  to the rhetoric tossed around by politicans today, including Obama, regarding the “War on Terror” and the outside menace, the line drawn in the sand, “you’re” either with us or against us mentality cultivated  the partisan-obsessed  United States.  Kingsolver also addresses the ambivalence inherent in the lifestyle of Mexican communists, how one could profess to love the working people, to be anti-bourgois, to support the “breaking of oppression” while servants prepare empanedas in the kitchen.

Recommended if you are interested in Mexican history of the 1930’s, Trotsky–Kahlo–Rivera, the epic novel, or a chapter in  American history that directly lead to the Glenn Beck-style propensity for fear-mongering and ill-logic.