A central symbol of this ambitious new novel by Barbara Kingsolver
is the howler monkey. Denizen of the treetop canopy in Mexico and
Central America, a howler is hard to see, but impossible to miss. Once
a howler has trumpeted his message to the world, other howlers pile on
to outdo him.

Just—according to Kingsolver’s central character—like
the press, the “talkers,” not the “thinkers.”

The Lacuna takes place between the 1930s and the 1950s, in
Mexico and the Southern United States. It opens with young Harrison
William Shepherd hearing the howlers at dawn on a Mexican island.
Shepherd will eventually grow up to be a famous American novelist, but
at the beginning of the book, he’s a neglected half-white kid stuck off
Veracruz with his Mexican mother and her current married boyfriend, and
he thinks the howlers are demons out to gobble his flesh.

The child hangs out at the beach, discovers the beauty of the
undersea world, and learns about social dynamics: Even though it feels
as if you’re swimming with the fishes, when the shark arrives, you’re
on your own. He also discovers an amazing underwater cave that’s
actually a passageway out to the sea … a lacuna. As a mysterious
space, a dangerous opening, a historical missing piece, “lacuna” proves
serviceable to Kingsolver in a novel about telling truth in a roiling
political climate.

Later, Shepherd will find himself in Mexico City with painters Diego
Rivera and Frida Kahlo and revolutionary Lev Trotsky—which will
put him in roiling political company.

This is Barbara Kingsolver’s seventh work of fiction, and her 12th
book, including nonfiction, essays and poetry. The one-time Tucson
resident is always concerned with political, social and environment
issues, and in The Lacuna, she takes on the “talkers”—the
press, and art and literary critics—and the relationship of the
artist to truth, politics and society.

Shepherd’s story is told through his personal journals, compiled by
his former secretary who calls herself “The Archivist.” He begins
writing during his nomadic childhood. (His ambitious mother is always
on the lookout for the next meal ticket.) The narrative line comprises
Shepherd’s journals, letters, news reports, reviews and fan mail, and
the Archivist’s commentary.

Shepherd stumbles accidentally into the Kahlo-Rivera realm.
Essentially a street kid in Mexico City, he’s heard about a new mural
being painted and catches Rivera just when he needs a new
plaster-mixer. Shepherd hasn’t mixed plaster before, but he’s mixed
pastry dough, and his pastry prowess lands him first a plastering job,
then a cooking job. Later, his typing and language skills secure him a
secretarial post, and he’s there when Trotsky appears.

When historical exigencies press in 1940, Shepherd flees to the
United States. He’s unqualified to serve in the military (breaking
World War II’s version of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”), so he settles
quietly in North Carolina. There, he finishes the novel he’d been
working on in Mexico, and it’s an immediate popular hit. By novel no.
2, he’s well into the literary limelight. The possibility of a movie
contact, however, along with his Mexico connections, gets Shepherd
caught up in the anti-communist craziness.

Kingsolver has created a reserved, unassuming character in Harrison
Shepherd. He’s so unassuming, in fact, that he becomes a cipher.
Kingsolver’s trademark nuanced characterization is not well-served by
this collaged point of view.

Although Shepherd is doing with his life what he aspired to
do—to write—the journals don’t show him deriving much joy
from it. His privacy is threatened, and he hides out at home. The
press, Shepherd learns, lies. Editors pander to the public. Reviewers
envy. Fans write him presumptuous drivel. It’s a burden being a
celebrity for art, he discovers, being “employed by the American
imagination,” a situation he satirizes in his “Universal Declaration of
the Rights of Howlers.” In essence, the “Declaration” proclaims that
the public has the “god-given right” to gleefully, rudely, stupidly,
loudly and mendaciously cut down artists and toss ’em into the
fire.

Kingsolver expresses clear concern about the treatment of artists
and the respect accorded them and their truths in The Lacuna. I
wish I could say we get to know Shepherd well enough to sympathize with
him and agree with her. However, while the cipher in Frida Kahlo’s
kitchen and Richard Nixon’s House of Representatives is intriguing, the
cipher in the extended whine is not.

This article appears in Nov 12-18, 2009.