Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver

I think Barbara Kingsolver is one of the most important and socially significant authors of the last fifty years. Her latest novel Unsheltered is not a happy read, but it important and very relevant to our times. Kingsolver is a fine scientist as she shows in her essays, High Tide in Tucson as well as in her many novels. Indeed, the science asides in this latest novel are fascinating even when not essential to the plot.

The novel is really two stories, one occurring at the end of the 19^th century, and the other in the present. Iano and Willa have been chasing tenure and job security for almost all of their married lives, and it has so far eluded them.  Their two children, Zeke and Antigony (Tig or Tiger for short) have been forced to live the same itinerant lifestyle as their parents. Zeke, newly out of grad school with massive student debts, has just lost his young wife to cancer, and is suddenly faced not just with that loss, but also with an infant son. Willa and Iano take on the care of the infant and Zeke moves back home. Tig has not quite finished a science degree when she drops out of college and goes to Cuba with her boyfriend. But she, too, without much explanation to her parents shows up on their doorstep, ready to resume her sometimes bitter sibling rivalry with  Zeke. The house they are living in is quickly falling apart and they are told the best route is simply to tear the old structure down and build over the ruins. 

The other story is that of Thatcher Greenwood, his young materialistic wife Rose, Rose’s younger sister Polly and the mother of the two young women, all of whom live in the same house. They, too, are living in a house that is falling apart, and have only Thatcher’s meager income as a high school science teacher to try to shore things up. Both families are very nearly unsheltered with insufficient income to remodel or rebuild. 

Mary Treat is an actual historical figure—an under-recognized biologist and a correspondent of both Charles Darwin and Asa Gray. She is a neighbor of the Greenwoods, and her story is another important strand in the novel. Indeed, I would say that the relationship between Thatcher and Mary is the most intriguing in the book. The New Jersey town that all the characters live in was meant to be a modern utopia, and when established in the 19^th century, it was ruled by a more or less benevolent tyrant by the name of Landis who lures people to the village with promises of free land, and then essentially indentures them as their farms and businesses fail and they must rely on Landis and the company store. The  school where  Thatcher teaches is  ruled by  Landis’ handpicked principal who is self-righteous,  anti-curiosity and anti-science; although the principal has not read Darwin and would not consider doing so, he knows that Darwin must be wrong, since his writings conflict with scripture. 

Although the Thatcher Greenwood story predates the famous Scopes trial by a decade or so, there is a wonderful scene in the book in which Thatcher takes on the principal and the pseudo-science he represents. Thatcher, who is genuinely a champion of reason and empirical evidence, is nevertheless socially inept and shy of confrontation. Mary Treat and his sister-in-law, Polly, take it on themselves to school Thatcher on the methods he must use in the debate. Kingsolver shows off her own understanding of the history of science as she describes this debate. Mary is certainly the character most like Kingsolver in the book.

A reader friend of mine whose opinion I greatly respect, has complained to me that the characters in the novel are not filled out well and not particularly convincing. I understand his  position, but I found most of the characters both well drawn and convincing. In fact, one of the reasons I have been vigorously recommending this novel to women friends is that I find the descriptions of the conflicts between Willa and Tig so convincing. Tig accuses Willa of sacrificing her children’s welfare to the continued and unsuccessful chasing of tenure and job-security, moving them from town to town, each time uprooting them and thus interrupting their own growth and social happiness. 

I saw you and Dad doing that, hitching your wagon to the tenure star, and it didn’t look that great to me. You made such a big deal about security that sacrificed giving us any long-term, community.

The accusations Tig throws at Willa, and her uncompromising attacks on her parenting are so like the mother-daughter relationships of two of my closest women friends. I felt the hurt and heartsoreness of Willa so totally.

There are many other features of this book that I haven’t the time to mention. Tig paints for the reader a fascinating picture of Cuba and of attempts there to reuse and recycle. I also very much enjoyed Kingsolver’s obvious jibes at Trump, although she doesn’t call him out by name, referring to him only as The Blowhard or The Mouth, but there is no doubt to whom she is referring. “I suppose it is in our nature, she said finally. “When men fear the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore the old order.”

While I personally see the importance of this book as primarily social commentary and championing scientific objectivity, I think it is quite worthwhile simply as an engaging story. I count it as one of the best books of 2018.

Nora Webster by Colm Toibin

If you have not yet read Colm Toibin, you are in for a treat. Not long ago, I reviewed his magnificent novel, Brooklyn, and today I want to talk to you about another stunning novel, Nora Webster. This is a novel that closely describes the inner mind of a woman, Nora, who, widowed in her late forties, is sole responsible for her home and her four children, only two of whom still live at home.

In my experience as a reader, I rarely find male authors who create believable women characters. Toibin goes much further; he describes in great detail and in first person narrative the stream of consciousness of a woman struggling to recreate herself as an independent woman. Nora is an intensely private person, but given the small Irish town in which she lives, it is difficult to maintain even a modicum of privacy since everyone wants and expects to know other’s business.

“You must be fed up of them. Will they never stop coming?” Tom O’Connor, her neighbor, stood at her front door and looked at her, waiting for a response.

Nora replies that they mean well. 

“Night after night,” he said. “I don’t know how you put up with it.”

She wondered if she could get back into the house without having to answer him again. He was using a tone with her, a tone he would never have tried before. He was speaking as though he had some authority over her.

And her neighbor is not the only person who speaks to her in this new way. She finds she must return to a job she never liked, and work for a man who seems to assume this paternal tone is quite justified. 

Once more she noted the hectoring tone, as though she were a child, unable to make proper decisions. She had tried since the funeral to ignore this tone, or to tolerate it. She had tried to understand that it was shorthand for kindness.

And further:

In future, once the boys went to bed, she might have the house to herself more often. She would learn to spend these hours. In the peace of these winter evenings, she would work out how she was going to live.

And what a fine job of it she does. She takes her family, including the two older girls who are out of the family home, on an inexpensive caravan holiday, and slowly her children come to see the inner strength Nora has, and that they can rely on her. Of course, the process is slow and often so lonely and painful, but she begins to find the joyful person she once was as she goes through the motions of working and dealing with others. The hardest part is knowing what to say to friends, how to socialize, when in the past she had left most of that to Maurice, her much more talkative and social husband. 

At the moment the only topic she could discuss was herself. And everyone, she felt, had heard enough about a her. They believed it was time that she stop brooding and think of other things. But here were no other things. There was only what had happened. It was as though she lived underwater and had given up the struggle to swim towards air. It would be too much. Being released into the world of others seemed impossible; it was something she did not even want. How could she explain this to anyone who sought to know how she was or asked if she was getting over what had happened?

The profundity of this novel is not due to some sudden existential moment, some cosmic insight. Instead it is in the detailed description of how Nora copes and how she literally creates herself. After years of not being musical, she returns to singing, and that is an important step for her in becoming. She finds a singing teacher who urges her to sing in a choir. The teacher, Laurie, comments:

“You know I sang for Nadia Boulanager,” Laurie continued, “and one thing she said was that singing is not something you do, it is something you live. Wasn’t that wise?”

And while Nora does not know how to respond to this at the time, she does come to live her singing, and that along with the growing strength she feels in helping her children and making a home for them allow her to emerge as a self-made person.

I will not provide more of the meticulous description Toibin uses to describe this coming to fruition of a strong and independent woman, but I hope you will pick up the novel yourself and marvel at both Nora and Toibin. The novel is a rather long one, and there is little dramatic action or crescendo, but I found the book lovely and deeply insightful. I recommend it to you along with his other finely crafted books.

Border Crossing by Pat Barker

I want to talk to you this morning about a frighteningly good book by Pat Barker, entitled Border Crossing. Many of you readers will know Barker for her trilogy Regeneration, the third of which The Ghost Road, won the Booker prize in 1995. In the first book of the Trilogy, Regeneration, Barker describes what was then called shellshock, but would now be called post-traumatic stress disorder, and the near barbaric ways in which it was treated in World War I. As one commentator puts it, “Pat Barker understands the dynamics of psychic trauma and shutdown as well as any writer living…In Border Crossing Barker brings post-traumatic stress disorder from the literal to the domestic battlefield.”

I will not tell you much of the story, since it is the story, itself, which is so frightening and insightful. A therapist, Tom Seymour is walking and quietly arguing with his wife as he sees a young man jump into the icy Tyne river. He jumps into the river to save the young man without realizing that Danny, the boy he is saving, is the same boy who was convicted of murdering an old woman when he was ten years old, convicted in adult court largely on the basis of Tom’s psychological assessment of him and his ability to understand what he has done. Due to the notoriety of the crime, when Danny is released from prison, he is given a new identity. Tom’s marriage is dissolving as the story begins, and the two main strands of the novel have to do with Tom’s ‘treatment’ of the young man and  the struggle he and his wife Lauren are going through as their marriage unravels.  

Tom is in the process of writing a book on children with “conduct disorder”

It was too easily assumed that such children simply lacked conscience. Of course, a minority did… Many of the children, and most of the adolescents he talked to, were preoccupied—no, obsessed—with issues of loyalty, betrayal, justice, rights (theirs), courage, reputation, shame. Theirs was a warrior morality, primitive and exacting.

In spite of overwhelming forensic evidence that Danny did commit the murder of which he is accused, he claims to have no memory of it, and even after being released from prison, still maintains his innocence. The discussions between Tom and Danny, not really therapy sessions, but more like discussions about morality between adults are wonderfully complex. Barker is able to lay out the inner working of the mind in such incredible rich detail.

I think I will not reveal more of the plot of this short but intense novel, but instead remark that while Barker will, I think, be remembered primarily as a war novelist, her themes are actually much more diverse than that. Her novels about poor Irish women raising their children usually with no help from their men make it clear that she writes from intimate experience. Her early novels, Union Street and Blow Your House Down are every bit as profound and revelatory as Regeneration, though they did not get the critical acclaim deserved.  

Having been mired in contemporary mysteries and romances for a bit too long, it was exciting and refreshing to discover this Barker that I had not read. I recommend all of her books to you and think her one of the most important novelists of the last fifty years.