Barbara Kingsolver’s Artists and Idols by Liesl Schillinger

Barbara Kingsolver’s Artists and Idols by Liesl Schillinger

THE LACUNA

By Barbara Kingsolver

507 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $26.99

A skinny young boy holds his breath and dives into the mouth of an underwater cave — a lacuna — swimming toward pale blue light as his lungs scream for oxygen. He emerges, gasping, in a ghostly cenote, a sinkhole in the Mexican jungle fringed with broken coral, wedged with human bones: a place of sacrifice and buried remembrance. When the tide rushes out, it will take the boy with it, “dragging a coward explorer back from the secret place, sucking him out through the tunnel and spitting him into the open sea.” He’ll paddle to shore and walk home, obsessed forever after by hidden passages that contain deeper meanings — meanings that only art may recapture. He’ll acquire a notebook and fill it with stories and memories; when it’s full, he’ll begin another and then another. But were he to consign these notebooks to the scrapheap, how would their mysteries be known? Who dares plunge into the wreckage of a discarded history, not knowing the risks of retrieval?

Barbara Kingsolver’s breathtaking new novel, “Lacuna,” follows this quiet, dreamy boy, Harrison William Shepherd, from 1929 to 1951. When we first meet him, he’s 12 years old, living at a hacienda on Isla Pixol with his self-dramatizing mother, Salomé, both of them petrified by the howling monkeys in the trees above, which they believe to be carnivorous demons. “You had better write all this in your notebook,” Salomé tells Shepherd, “so when nothing is left of us but bones, someone will know where we went.”

A year earlier, Salomé, a slang-slinging Mexican beauty, had ditched her drab American husband (Shepherd’s father) in Washington, D.C., and chased an oilman back to his Mexican estate. On Isla Pixol, as Salomé sulks over her love life like a bobby-soxer, lonely Shepherd befriends the hacienda’s cook, who turns the boy into a sous-chef while innocently cluing the kid into his sexuality (which bobby-soxers will never unleash). Shepherd’s other close companions are the volumes in the hacienda library and his notebook, which he regards as “a prisoner’s plan for escape.” In the short term, though, it’s Salomé who escapes Isla Pixol, dragging the boy with her, bolting for Mexico City in pursuit of an American she calls “Mr. Produce the Cash” — and, after him, others.

His mother is not a puta, Shepherd reflects, with detached sympathy, even as he overhears her “bedroom jolly-ups” through thin walls. She’s just a romantic woman who yearns for “an admirer” as she tries to put a roof over their heads. Nonetheless, while still in his teens the boy embarks upon a different path, toward a life unruled by passion. “People contort themselves around the terror of being alone, making any compromise against that,” he observes later in life. “It’s a great freedom to give up on love and get on with everything else.” But it’s a freedom more easily imagined than lived.

Leaving his mother to her Mme. Bovary messes, Shepherd parlays his domestic skills into a job mixing plaster for Diego Rivera’s murals (“It’s like making dough for pan dulce”) and joins the Rivera household as cook and typist for Rivera, his artist wife, Frida Kahlo, and later for their guest, the exiled Communist leader Leon Trotsky. In this incendiary, revolutionary household, Shepherd keeps mum and lets louder egos roar, just as he did on Isla Pixol. Baking bread by day, he records the daily dramas of this entourage by night, along with a draft of his first novel, an epic of the Aztec empire. But in 1940, when Trotsky is assassinated, Shepherd leaves Mexico, spooked by the virulent press that denounces his employers and their murdered ward “like the howlers on Isla Pixol.” At the age of 24, he returns to the United States and settles in Asheville, N.C. There he becomes a reclusive, gentlemanly author of swashbuckling Mexican historical novels (“Vassals of Majesty,” “Pilgrims of Chapultepec”) until the ungentlemanly House Un-American Activities Committee drags him into the spotlight, rewriting his character in crude strokes for the public stage.

Shepherd had thought discretion would protect him, since his private thoughts were safely interred in his journals. “Dios habla por el que calla,” he likes to tell his devoted Asheville secretary, Violet Brown: “ God speaks for the silent man.” But Brown, who knows that God doesn’t always speak as loudly as Senator ­McCarthy, tells her boss that unlike another local writer, Thomas Wolfe, he was prudent to set his fiction outside Asheville — and America. “People love to read of sins and errors, just not their own,” she remarks. “You were wise to put your characters far from here.” As it turns out, they weren’t far enough. The book we read today, Brown reveals, was assembled by herself in 1959 from Shepherd’s junked notebooks and sealed for 50 years, to be opened in 2009 — when she hoped it could inform readers about “those who labored and birthed the times they have inherited.”

How can the experiences of a fictional loner merge with those of larger-than-life figures who played a pivotal role in world politics? And what can readers learn from their intersection? Those are the questions answered by this dazzling novel, which plunges into Shepherd’s notebooks to dredge up not only the perceptions they conceal but also a history larger than his own, touching on everything from Trotskyism, Stalinism and the Red scare to racism, mass hysteria and the media’s intrusion into personal and national affairs. More than half a century on, names like Trotsky, Rivera, Kahlo and McCarthy can lose their definition, like coins with the faces rubbed off. Shepherd’s reminis­cences step in where the historical record can’t, restoring human contours. To Shepherd, working as a cook in the Rivera kitchen, Trotsky was more than a defender of the working man; he was a person of flesh and blood — “compact, muscular,” with the build of a peasant, who clasped a pen “as if it were an ax handle” and liked to feed chickens when he wasn’t unspooling his thoughts on the Fourth Inter­national. Trotsky’s optimism — while he was in exile and under death threats — leads Shepherd to marvel, “Does a man become a revolutionary out of the belief he’s entitled to joy rather than submission?”

Frida KAHLO tells Shepherd he has a “pierced soul” like her own and respects his artistic commitment, even as she teases him cruelly for his closeted sexual drives. “To be a good artist you have to know something that’s true,” she tells him; and reputation isn’t worth worrying about. “People will always stare at the queer birds like you and me,” she says, in a spirit of defiance, not empathy. Coasting on a pleasure boat through the floating gardens of Xochimilco with Trotsky (who was briefly her lover), Shepherd and Trotsky’s secretary, Van, whom Shepherd secretly loves, Kahlo buys a woven toy called a trapanovio “for catching boyfriends” and taunts him to try it on Van. Shepherd keeps the toy as a “souvenir of a remarkable humiliation.” Yet Shepherd, who learned compassion for others, if not for himself, at his diva mother’s knee, soothes Kahlo when Rivera wants a divorce. “Even in her disconsolate state she looked like a peacock,” he notices. “Perfectly dressed in a green silk skirt and enough jewelry to sink a boat. Even drowning, Frida would cling to vanity.”

Such texture doesn’t interest the heavies from the House Un-American Activities Committee, for whom the names Trotsky, Rivera and Kahlo set off ­Communist-menace alarm bells. In 1947, meeting with his lawyer in North Carolina to discuss a letter from J. Edgar Hoover, Shepherd doesn’t understand why the F.B.I. would care about his Mexican past. “I was a cook,” he explains. “Let me just say,” the lawyer replies, “these subtleties are lost.”

“The Lacuna” can be enjoyed sheerly for the music of its passages on nature, archaeology, food and friendship; or for its portraits of real and invented people; or for its harmonious choir of voices. But the fuller value of Kingsolver’s novel lies in its call to conscience and connection. She has mined Shepherd’s richly imagined history to create a tableau vivant of epochs and people that time has transformed almost past recognition. Yet it’s a tableau vivant whose story line resonates in the present day, albeit with different players. Through Shepherd’s resurrected notebooks, Kingsolver gives voice to truths whose teller could express them only in silence.

Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/books/review/Schillinger-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3