BayouPages | “The Lacuna” by Barbara Kingsolver

review by Meredith McKinnie

“Trauma is not what happens to you but what happens inside you.”

I first fell in love with Barbara Kingsolver’s voice while reading Flight Behavior, which I reviewed here in May of 2022. Kingsolver’s impressive ability to take on entire literary worlds is astounding in scope and impressive in practice. In this novel The Lacuna, Kingsolver chronicles the parallel trajectory and intermingling of Mexican and American history from 1929-1951. The protagonist Harrison Shepherd is hustled to Mexico on the whims of his mother’s love affair. He marvels at the natural landscape, delves into underwater caves, curious about the environment around him and its secrets. Harrison takes a similar approach in his interactions with people, providing us a sideliner’s view into the worlds of those who transform history. 

When Harrison takes a job with renowned painter Diego Rivera, he befriends his wife Frida Kahlo, morphing into her confidant. The two share a friendship that undergirds rife political turmoil in the region, as the Rivera household welcomes excommunicated Communist leaders and their families. Harrison documents the daily struggles of Leon Trotsky, acting as his secretary. Kingsolver allows us to glimpse political history through the viewpoint of someone in the right place at the right time. Harrison’s youth and the rife environment forces the mature boy to grow up fast, eventually hiding himself from the world around him. He relocates to Asheville, North Carolina in his early twenties after suffering tragedy and begins writing the novel that would become a literary masterpiece – the novel we’re reading. Harrison responds with, “Murder has the weight of an unpaid debt, death as unfinished business.”

As I was reading The Lacuna, I kept admiring the time and research that the author devoted to this project. The characters having lived real lives outside of this story added to the intrigue. What Kingsolver does so well is to use narrative to prompt further curiosity in a time, a place, or a group of people. I wanted to know more about them than what history had recorded or what Kingsolver had imagined. If this book has a flaw, it is with the mystery of its storyteller. Though Harrison is the primary voice, he is almost unknowable and not in a way that seems appropriate for a novel of such expansive scope. To trust his viewpoint, I wanted to know more about the man that didn’t make the history books. Kingsolver leans on the other characters to unravel the mystery of the protagonist, an interesting strategy, but one that left me wanting more. 

“Many of the personality traits we have come to believe are us, and perhaps even take pride in, actually bear the scars of where we lost connection to ourselves, way back when.”