The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

Try to imagine what might have happened, how history might have rolled out, had Lenin not had a stroke at just the moment when Trotsky was on a train taking him to a resort for a much needed short vacation. Trotsky, a champion of democratic socialism, was next in line to succeed Lenin. Suppose he had not believed Stalin’s lie that there was no need for him to return immediately, since only a small, private service would occur to be followed weeks later by a huge state funeral. Imagine Stalin seizing on the accident of Trotsky’s absence from the state service, which in fact did occur almost immediately, to condemn him as at best disloyal, and at worst treasonous. Trotsky then declared an enemy of the state, a counter-revolutionary, and the ruthless Stalin assuming the mantel of power, liquidating any who dissented and setting the USSR on a course of rigidly centralized government. Suppose it had been otherwise.

In her incredibly ambitious novel, The Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver posits the above question as one among many themes. She also takes on McCarthyism, the possibility of getting anything like truth from the press, the political responsibilities of the artist, the love life of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, the devastation of World War II, the tyranny of the F.B.I. under J. Edgar Hoover, and the Mayan and Aztec empires of Mexico. 

I am a great admirer of Kingsolver; I have read almost all of her fiction and much of her non-fiction. I admire the way she weaves her love of biology and environmental issues into her works, her staunch support of feminist issues, her insistence that art is and must be political. That said, I think this particular book suffers from trying to do too much. A skillful editor may have convinced her to cut the sprawling five hundred page novel in half, or better yet, to make it into a series of books—perhaps one about the ancient history of Mexico, another about the relationship between Kahlo, Rivera, and Trotsky, and yet another about the perils of being an artist during the McCarthy era in the U.S. Trying to combine them all into one book obscures her message about the necessity of constantly viewing the present in historical context and, in my opinion, creates a morass stitched together by Kingsolver’s own broad interests rather than by an internal, organic unity. 

Kingsolver is certainly right to remind us that we are too quick to forget the past, too gullible in our trust of the press, too ready to turn a blind eye to the political oppression that has occurred in our recent past and which continues to occur now. However, a colleague of mine and I who decided to read this book together because of our admiration of Kingsolver found ourselves asking why she wrote the book at all, or, at least, why she tried to combine all of these different themes into a single book. There is no doubt that she had a keen interest in Trotsky and the ruthless way in which he was hunted down and killed in Mexico. Her research into the lives of Trotsky, Frida Kahlo, and Diego Rivera is impressive, as is her knowledge of Mayan and Aztec cultures. Her descriptions of what it must have been like for artists who suffered through the McCarthy witch-hunts is both harrowing and convincing. 

The spokesperson in this novel, Harrison Shepherd, is a young man who straddles two cultures—born in the U.S. of a Mexican mother and American father, but raised for most of his young life in Mexico. He returns to this country after the death of Trotsky, settles into a small town in North Carolina and becomes a well known author who writes epics about the ancient Mayan and Aztec civilizations of Mexico. Kingsolver uses the device of yet another narrator, Violet Brown, secretary to Sheperd, to give the reader another view of both the writer and the events that shape his life in the U.S.

Perhaps Kingsolver gives us a clue as to why she wrote this book in a conversation that occurs between Shepherd and Violet Brown.

“I have been wondering what your novel will be about,” she said. “Apart from the setting.” 

“I wonder too. I think I want to write about the end of things. How civilizations fall, and what leads up to that. How we’re connected to everything in the past."  

To my shock she said, “Oh, I wouldn’t.” 

“I think the readers won’t like it. We don’t like to see ourselves joined hard to the past. We’d as soon take the scissors and cut every ribbon of that." 

“Then I am sunk. All I ever write about is history.”

“People in gold arm bracelets, though. Nothing that would happen to our own kind. That’s how I reckon people take to it so well.”

“Oh. Then you think it wouldn’t go so well if I set my stories, let’s say, in a concentration camp in Texas or Georgia. One of those places where we sent our citizen Japs and Germans during the war.”

She looked stricken. “No, sir, we would not like to read that. Not even about the other Japanese sinking ships and bombing our coast. That’s over, and we’d just as soon be shed of it.”

“You’d do that? Take scissors and cut off your past?”

“I did already. My family would tell you I went to the town and got above my raisings.”

“Like I said. The magazines tell us we’re special, not like the ones that birthed us. Brand-new. They paint a picture of some old-country rube with a shawl on her head, and make you fear you’ll be like that, unless you buy cake mix and a home freezer. 

“But that sounds lonely, walking around without any ancestors.”

“I don’t say it’s good. It’s just how we be. I hate to say it, but that rube in the shawl is my sister, and I don’t want to be her. I can’t help it.”

Kingsolver does not want us to take scissors to our past; she wants to place us squarely in it. Not just the past in this country, but the past of Cortes and the Aztecs and the even more ancient Mayans. The past of Trotsky and Kahlo and Rivera. The ugliness of war and of political repression. I applaud her insistence on historicity. I admire her politics and her mighty gifts of story-telling, and perhaps you as readers will see more clearly than I just why all of these themes had to be gathered together in one sprawling novel. In this case, I can only say I’m glad to be finished and to move on.

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

On the face of it, Julian Barnes’ Man Booker Prize winner, The Sense of an Ending, is not only a very short novel, it is also a very simple one. But then one might say that Barnes whole point in the novel is that no part of so-called history is to be taken on its face. Every life is more complicated than it seems, and memory a flimsy and unreliable guide even to our own lives, let alone the lives of those around us.

The story begins as one of three boys together at a boarding school: Tony, Colin, and Alex, who are then joined by a fourth, Adrian Finn. It is Tony who tells the story, but it Adrian who awakens the other three, and in a sense catapults them into their lives. 

In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when the moment came, our lives—and time itself—would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first indiscernible. 

Adrian is the brightest of the boys, and also the most serious. While the original three seem simply to use their cleverness to get by, Adrian is already deeply engaged. One of their teachers raises a question central to the novel, “What is history?” Adrian’s response seems at first as flippant as the offhand answers of the others, but turns out to be anything but flippant.

“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.” 

The first half of this short book takes the boys through boarding school, and the reader gets a perceptive look at the sexual insecurities of teenage boys who are anxious to meet girls, but unsure about what they expect or even want from them. Although the four boys pledge to remain close forever, in fact as they drift into their post-boarding school lives, different schools, different professions, they also drift from one another. Tony, the narrator, has a brief and perplexing relationship with a girl, Veronica, who then becomes involved with Adrian. Although Tony exited the relationship before Adrian hooks up with Veronica, he nevertheless manages to feel betrayed by both, with mild reservations about whether his reading is a just one. “Again, I must stress that this is my reading now of what happened then. Or rather, my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the time.”

Abruptly, surprisingly, the reader is informed that Adrian, the thinker, the serious one, commits suicide at twenty-two, having left an enigmatic, though existentially lucid note of explanation. Book One concludes with Tony grown up, married and divorced, his child also grown, and now looking back on his life as complete and, if not sensational, nevertheless satisfactory. So why a book Two at all? The slice of life novel seems complete, well written, entertaining if not extraordinary. But of course it is Book Two that re-raises all the questions about history, and shows graphically just where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacy of documentation. 

Although I have no intention of giving away the mysteries introduced in Book Two, it is this second looking back that makes this a profound novel. Tony, in his retirement, continues to read history, though he finds himself more interested in the histories of Greece and Rome than with those of his own time. 

Perhaps I just feel safe with the history that’s been more or less agreed upon. Or perhaps it’s that same paradox again: the history that happens underneath our noses ought to be the clearest, and yet it’s the most deliquescent. We live in time, it bounds us and defines us, and time is supposed to measure history, isn’t it? But if we can’t understand time, can’t grasp its mysteries of pace and progress, what chance do we have with history—even our own small, personal, largely undocumented piece of it?

A letter, along with a relatively small amount of money bequeathed him from an unlikely source, causes Tony to look again at his own life and to see how that lovely word, ‘deliquescent’ applies to his history. Indeed, the picture he has, the story he has told himself over and over until it has become solid and clear, begins to dissolve, to become liquid. Everything begins to shift; all that was in focus blurs. Nothing is as it had seemed. Not simply in Tony’s life, but for all of us who step back to take another look. 

It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.

While Book Two is what transforms this book from simply a well-told slice-of-life story into a philosophically profound piece, when I finished the book, I still found myself puzzled by all the attention it has received. Is this really a Booker Prize sort of novel? But after letting it percolate for a bit, I picked it up again, looking back on it a second time, much as Tony looks again at his own life, and this time I was struck with its depth. I now think it is much more than a well told story; I think you will too.

The Summer of Naked Swim Parties by Jessica Anya Blau

I have to admit that despite the horrors of the Viet Nam war and the political chaos in the U.S. in the early seventies, I feel that I came of age politically, socially, and morally in that decade. It seemed a time when there was a great surge towards freedom—a time when students and workers had more power than anytime since, and when young and old came together in like-minded struggles attempting to limit the power of the rich and to call attention to and put the brakes on economic imperialism around the world. It was a heady and vigorous time, and in most ways, I feel lucky to have lived through it and learned from it.

For that very reason I have been surprised by the reactions of some of the kids who were raised in that era—people who came to see themselves as victims of the relaxed sexual and social norms of the time rather than as beneficiaries. In her 2008 debut novel, The Summer of Naked Swim Parties, Jessica Anya Blau recalls what it was like for her and her slightly older sister to grow up in a so-called liberated household.

Jamie and her sister, Renee, fervently wish that they had ‘normal’ parents—parents who gave them curfews, scrutinized their friends, even checked on the truth of just where they really would be on their overnight slumber parties. Jamie’s friends think her parents are super-cool; they have the access to the best weed in town, trust their daughters implicitly, and seem more interested than concerned about the sex lives of their fourteen and fifteen year old daughters. If there is anything that embarrasses Jamie more than the nudity of her parents at swim parties around the family pool, it is her mother’s wanting to share in Jamie’s coming of age and her dawning sexuality.

The night before her first real date with a boy (he is seventeen, she fourteen), she asks her parents what time they expect her home.

“When did you say this date was?” Betty {her mother} asked.
“Tomorrow night,” Jamie said.
“Dan and I won’t even be home,” Betty said. “We’re going grunion hunting with Leon and Lois.”
“Well, what time will you be home?
“I dunno, three, four in the morning.”
“Mom! Please be home by midnight. I don’t want to come home to an empty house.”
“So stay out past three.”

While most of this little novel is light-hearted and meant to be humorous, there is quite obviously an undercurrent of real fear in Jamie, and genuine disdain for the ways in which her parents conduct their lives. I’m reminded of another more serious (and on the whole much better) memoir by Joelle Fraser entitled The Territory of Men. In both of these books, it is quite obvious that the main characters see themselves as casualties rather than beneficiaries of the 70s, mostly because they were too early introduced both to sex and to drugs.

Jamie recalls a typical party thrown by her parents:

There were twelve adults and eight kids at the party. The children clumped together in an approximation of their parents’ friendship; theirs was an intimacy borne of the shared experience of witnessing the grown-ups revelries.

All of the adults were naked. All of the kids were in swimsuits, even the one-year-old girl, Lacey, who wore a bandana-print suit.

Jaime’s sister, Renee, is even more disgusted and disdainful of her parents and these parties than Jamie, and escapes the entire family whenever possible via Christian summer camps or excursions with friends in what she sees as normal families. Jaime is simultaneously attracted and repelled by the lives her parents lead, but her attitude towards the adult nakedness is univocal.

Here’s the thing adults should know when they choose to dance naked, Jamie thought: Everything bounces, and the bouncing isn’t necessarily on beat with the music. So watching a naked adult dance is like watching a 3-D movie without the glasses; a shadow image beside the real one.

She continues with a more graphic description of just what bounces and how it looks that I won’t report here; suffice it to say that even her interest in those bouncing body parts is born of disgust.

In addition to Jamie’s recollections of and critique of her parents’ lives, this is also a story about her first love. Again I am reminded of another book about the seventies, Alix Kate Shulman’s excellent memoir, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen. Alix recalls how the lovely and exciting times of kissing and hugging with boys comes to an abrupt end once she allows them to take her into the back seat, and all too soon achieve that fevered penetration. All the warmth and excitement are gone, and what is even worse, once the boys have scored, there is no going back to the warm cuddly times; boys only go forward, never back. Alix tells us that she gives up sex at eighteen, sure that there is nothing in it for her. Jamie, too, discovers that the exciting build up from kissing, to touching, to heavy petting leads not to the nirvana that she had hoped for (and that her mother insists is the nature of sex), but to at worst fear and pain, and at best boredom and waiting for him to finish. And like Kate’s experiences, there is no going back to the more innocent and much more rewarding times of cuddling and exchanging of confidences. Jamie’s boyfriend, Flip, disappears from her life as quickly as he magically appeared, and while the sex is no loss, the companionship is.

While this is not a great book, it is quite well written and sadly funny. At least for this reader, it is a reminder that the seventies might have had a much different look and feel to kids brought up in those times than to me and my peers.