La Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver - a Review

Violet Brown, the narrator of La Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver’s latest novel, is the kind of faithful person I wonder if I am. She is loyal to her employer who becomes her friend and defends him beyond death as he is caught in the tide of anti-communism that flowed from the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the 1950’s. Her employer is Harrison William Shepherd, whom we meet as quite a child of the streets in Mexico in the 1930’s, naive to the political intrigue that surrounds his life, cook to Lev ("Leon" Trotsky) friend of Frieda Kahlo, son of an American Government worker and Mexican beauty. He begins his adult life in the United States when he accompanies art work from Kahlo and her husband, the muralist Diego Rivera, to the United States. After working as a protector of American Art during WWII and a short stint as a Spanish teacher, the success of his first novel, set in long ago Mexico, gives him the freedom to stay at home and write. The irony of the freedom to stay confined is subtly reflected in Shepherd’s dry, voice, a voice the reader clearly hears because the author is so, so, good at her craft, but that draws no empathy from the reader. He has become after all, an adult who has chosen to shut himself away, never discussing the only freedom he ever allowed himself - that of swimming in La Lacuna, an underwater tunnel when he was a child in Mexico. In the end, we remember that time. We remember that there is always hope if one waits for the tide to change, but not until we fully empathize with Violet Brown’s dilemma – whether to let written accounts of Shepherd’s life define him or let the world know the soul of the man by publishing through the journals he’d kept since childhood that she had not destroyed when he’d asked.
In Violet Brown, Ms. Kingsolver has given us an honest, hard-working, woman whose passion for the good comes through her conversations with Shepherd. Her idealism doesn’t blind her to the darkness Shepherd faces as the insidiousness of the politics of the early 1950’s overtakes their lives (and the novel.) “You are a poet, Mrs. Brown,” he says as he acknowledges the truth in her advice while choosing not to heed it.
My advice to you, dear reader, is to stick with this novel as it slogs through a very difficult time in American History. While Ms. Kingsolver comes close to proselytizing, the lesson to be learned is deeper than how fear controls politics. It is one that speaks to the power of fidelity and it is not learned until the book is closed and we say, “Wise choice, Mrs. Brown.”