‘The Lacuna’ by Barbara Kingsolver

W hen an author’s name is the prominent

feature of a book’s jacket, there is one
obvious conclusion you can draw. The author
is a brand – all that’s needed to guarantee brisk
sales. Another less obvious conclusion is that,
being successful; the author gets to pick the
title. The publisher may suggest a title, but
what’s going to sell is the author’s brand, so a
publisher is unlikely to press hard. So what?
There’s a world of difference between a title
picked by an author and one picked by a
marketing department. When an author picks a
title, it is likely to contain a significant clue to
understanding the book. And, for an author of
Barbara Kingsolver’s caliber, it is unlikely that she would be satisfied with a title that
expressed just one idea or feature of her book. She would select a title that was
multidimensional, reflecting the complexity and richness of her story.

In the case of ‘The Lacuna,’ I wondered if the title preceded the writing of the book or
even whether the word “lacuna” itself might have in some way been the spark igniting
the idea for the book. Whatever its genesis, ‘The Lacuna’ is a great title that represents
perfectly the many dimensions of this wonderful book.

[Before I go any further, here’s a definition. According to Dictionary.com, “lacuna” is “a

gap or missing part, as in a manuscript, series, or logical argument; hiatus.” It can also
refer to “one of the numerous minute cavities in the substance of a bone…”

The only usage of the word I could find was in Condi Rice’s 2007 congressional
testimony. "In response to charges that private security firms were not held accountable
for their aggressive behavior, Rice dodged responsibility by repeatedly referring to a
“lacuna” or a gap in the law that prevented the contractors from being prosecuted.” I
couldn’t resist including a poem by Madeleine Kane inspired by this testimony.

Pondering Condi

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 ‘The Lacuna’ by Barbara Kingsolver

By Madeleine Begun Kane

Rice shrugs off blame

For wartime’s toll.
Poor oversight?
Rice claims a hole—
A legal “lacuna”
Impedes control
Of contractor actions
On Iraq patrol.
Must fill that lacuna—
She touts that goal.
But who will fill
The lacuna in her soul?

For more, visit madcane.com. OK, now back the to reviewing the book.]

‘The Lacuna’ is a wonderfully imaginative historical novel that threads the fictional life
of its protagonist, Harrison William Shepherd, into the tumultuous lives of the celebrated
20th century Mexican artists, Diego Rivera and Freda Kaylo, and also the Russian
revolution leader, Leon Trotsky, who, for a time in the late 1930s lived in exile at Freda’s
villa in Mexico. Trotsky was assassinated there by one of Stalin’s assassins in 1940.
Kingsolver also manages to weave into her story Douglas Macarthur’s rout of the WW I
“Bonus Army” in 1932, as well as J. Edgar Hoover and the House Sub-Committee on
Un-American Activities’ post-war pursuit of communists in the late 1940s and early
1950s. Amazingly, it all works.

Notable among Kingsolver’s fictional characters is Shepherd’s Mexican mother, a

comically irresponsible, restless 1920s flapper who frantically attaches herself to one man
after another, as if jumping from one lily pad and then another, as the previous one sinks
under the weight of her expectations. A fatally attractive flapper, she thoroughly
absorbed the slang of that era, spouting words like “fillies” “pips” “sweet patooties and
no-o-o dotie brodies” and “I’m just razzing you” and “wad of tin” … and on and on. The
best example is a brilliantly comical conversation between mother and son on pages 136-
39 [Shepherd’s May 4th journal entry]. If you read nothing else, read this. It’s some of
the best dialogue in the book.

Another prominent character to emerge later in the story is Violet Brown, of the
“peculiar antique grammar,” to whom Shepherd, inviting her to become his secretary,

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writes, “… your discretion is prodigious. You resisted the siren song of tattle. The seams
of your character must be sewn with steel thread.” Violet emerges as a character worthy
of a book of her own. Strong-willed, independent-minded, seventeen years Shepherd’s
senior, she becomes his private secretary in Ashville, North Carolina in the 1940’s, and
eventual his archivist after his presumptive death. She has broken away from an
uncomprehending Carolina hill family to pursue a dream of independence and travel.

Harrison William Shepherd was born in 1916 just outside of Washington, D.C. in
Virginia of a Mexican mother, Solomé, and an American father – “a claims accountant
in her father’s firm who was helpless before her charms.” She was under age, but as
Shepherd himself writes, “She solved the mathematical problem of age sixteen by saying
she was twenty. At twenty-four she said the same thing again, balancing the equation.
She became Sally, confirmed in the church of expediency.”

From the very beginning, Shepherd was caught between two cultures. Subject to a
chaotic existence, he was tethered to a woman whose restless devotion to motherhood
was tenuous – at times deniable, if judged an impediment to attracting a man. Blessed
with a keen intelligence and natural gifts of a writer, Shepherd is destined to make sense
of it all by writing journals throughout his early years.

When Shepherd was ten years old or so, his mother ran off with him to Mexico to live
with Enrique, a wealthy Mexican landowner of several oil rich properties. Enrique
planted her and her son in an isolated hacienda on a plantation island called Isla Pixol, far
from the exciting urban life she had imagined. It is on Isla Pixol that Shepherd’s story
begins.

Solomé is enamored of the post-World War I flapper craze. Life on Isla Pixol is a great
disappointment to a woman whose blood has been heated to boiling by the “Roaring
Twenties.” At one point, as Enrique is entertaining American oilmen with whom he is
eager to make a deal, “Solomé tries to get them all to cut a rug. She cranked up the
Victrola and waved the mezcal bottle at the men, but they went to bed, leaving her
fluttering around the parlor like a balloon of air, let go.” That pretty well describes her
life on Isla Pixol. She is disdainful of the local natives and eager to make her escape. As

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 ‘The Lacuna’ by Barbara Kingsolver

a boy free of prejudice and mentored by their cook, Leandro, Shepherd sees it differently.
Shepherd writes admiringly of the couples dancing at a festival in the square, “…girls
with red yarn braided into their hair and wound around their heads in thick crowns.
Their white dresses swirled like froth, with skirts so wide they could take the hems in
their fingertips and raise them up to make sudden wings, like butterflies, fluttering as
they turned. The men’s high-heeled boots cut hard at the ground, drumming like penned
stallions. ‘Indian girls,’ his mother spat. ‘What kind of man would chase after that? A
corn-eater will never be any more than she is.’”

To Shepherd young eyes, “The dancers were butterflies.” To his mother, “From a
hundred paces Solomé could see the dirt under these girls’ fingernails, but not their
wings.”

It is at a newsstand in Isla Pixol that Shepherd persuades his mother to buy him a
student’s pasteboard notebook in which to keep a journal. It is here, also, that Leandro
teaches Shepherd to cook. And, it is Leandro who becomes Shepherd’s link to the Aztec
and Mayan history and Mexico’s past that will become the subjects of his novels, later
on. Eager to learn, Shepherd slips books out of “Enrique’s library, every wall was
covered with wooden cabinets. The room had no windows, only shelves, and all the book
cabinets had iron grilles covering their fronts like prisoners’ windows… The square
openings between the welded bars were just large enough for a fine-boned, long-fingered
boy to put his hand through, like slipping on an iron bracelet.” It is from these books
that he becomes fascinated with Mexican history and learns of Cortes and Montezuma
and the defeat of the Aztecs. His journals begin to take shape with wonderfully
descriptive entries like this, “No word is heard from the turkey that chased children from
the yard all December. He greets the New Year from the kitchen, a carcass of bones
attended by his audience of flies.” And he casts an observant, bemused eye on his
surroundings and, particularly, his mother, “a museum of bad words”, who, according to
his kitchen mentor, Leandro, “… can’t even remember the day she gave you birth. If an
orphan boy is going to have any luck, he will have to make it himself.”

It is on Isla Pixol as a boy of fourteen that Shepherd discovers the “Lacuna” – the

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underwater cave and the thematic metaphor of the book. On the opposite side of the
island, the cave is accessible only when the tide and the moon are perfectly aligned.
After several failed attempts and much study, Shepherd discovers that if you wait for a
full moon and a flood tide, a tall boy of fourteen who is a strong swimmer can swim
through the cave and surface in a saltwater pool in the center of the jungle; a pool that
turns out to be the center of an ancient ruin and site of countless human sacrifices. Here’s
another sample of Kingsolver’s magical prose.

“Amate trees stood in a circle around the water hole like curious men, gaping
because a boy from another world had suddenly arrived in their pool. The
Pombo trees squatted for a close look, with the knobbly wooden knees poking up
out of the water. A tiger heron stood one-legged on a rock, cocking an unfriendly
eye at the intruder. San Jaun Pescadero the kingfisher zipped back and forth
between two perches, crying, ‘Kill him hill him kill him!’ …. It was like coming
up inside of a storybook. An ancient temple in the forest, a pirates cave down
below.”

It isn’t long before Solomé looks for an escape route and finds it by charming “Mr.
Produce The Cash” from Mexico City while Enrique is away on one of his many trips
visiting his other properties. “Mr. P.T. Cash” eventually affects her escape to Mexico
City to become Mr. Cash’s “casa chica” in a small apartment above a bakery. Harrison
Shepherd writes in his journal, “Mother says a casa chica means probably his wife
knows about her but doesn’t mind.”

It is in Mexico City that Shepherd becomes acquainted with Diego Rivera and his wife,
Freda Kaylo. Quit by chance, due to his experience mixing dough in Leandro’s kitchen,
Shepherd becomes a plaster mixer for Diego Rivera, who is painting a mural in a public
building. When Rivera goes off to work on another project, Shepherd is left with nothing
to do but go to school. “School or a job is the only choice,” His mother says. Failing to
gain entrance into the Preparatoria, he “begins a year of all suffering at the School of
Cretins, Deaf Mutes, and Boys of Bad Character…”

“For a son on the wrong track, Mother has found a different set of rails and packed him

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 ‘The Lacuna’ by Barbara Kingsolver

off on them. ‘Lock, stock, and barrel’, she said.” He is sent to Washington, where his
father immediately enrolls him in the Potomac Academy just outside Washington, D.C.
Arriving from Mexico in winter, Shepherd is introduced to “nostril ice.”

“Mathematics: the worst. Nothing past the tables de multiplicar will ever fit in this
calabash. Algebra, a language spoken on the moon. For a boy with no plans to go
there,” he writes.

It was while enrolled at Potomac Academy – “A prison camp in brick buildings built to
look like mansions, where native leaders called Officers rule over the captives” – that
Shepherd witnesses, in 1932, McArthur’s infamous rout and burning of the shantytown
built by the “Bonus Army,” 17,000 starving veterans of WW I, and their families,
camped in Washington seeking bonus’ that they had been promised and of which they
were in desperate need. It was also here that Shepherd – described later in the book by
his lawyer as “disqualified from service on account of sexual indifference to the female
of the species…” – was caught in some unspecified sexual encounter with another student
and expelled. Later on, as the FBI is pursuing Shepherd, he burns the journal covering
this period – another of the many “lacunas” of this story.

Shepherd returns to Mexico City and is hired as a cook and private secretary by Diego
Rivera. Gradually, he becomes a confidant and close friend of Freda Kaylo and
chronicles (under Freda’s cautious, watchful eye) the arrival and exile of Leon Trotsky
and his wife. When Trotsky’s party move into another villa, Shepherd joins them there
as one of Trotsky’s personal secretaries. There is much turmoil that I am glossing over
here, like the explosive affair between Trotsky and Freda, and the plotting of Stalin’s
agent assassin, and Shepherd’s mother’s death.

When Trotsky is murdered, all of Shepherd’s journals, and much else of monetary value,
are confiscated by the Mexico City police. As far as Shepherd is concerned, they’ve
confiscated his soul, bringing his writing career to a halt.

After Trotsky’s assassination in 1940, Freda arranges for Shepherd to reenter the US as
her agent to accompany her traveling exhibit of paintings destined to various cities in the

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 ‘The Lacuna’ by Barbara Kingsolver

US. It is this experience that eventually earns him a job with the US Government,
moving artwork for safe keeping during the war from Washington to the Biltmore Estate
in Ashville, North Carolina.

Shepherd’s father has died, leaving him a roadster, which he drives south. He settles in
Ashville. Eventually, he opens a crate of a painting that Freda sent with him to
“Gringolandia” that contained one small painting, a gift to Shepherd. Living in a
rooming house, he had put off opening the crate but, when he finally does, he finds that
Freda has packed it with all of his journals, which she had rescued, by unspecified means,
from the police. This is the catalyst that reignites Shepherds passion to write again. He
embarks on a writing career in earnest, writing historical novels set in ancient Mexico –
novels that filled the “lacuna” of life missing from all the Aztec temples and hieroglyphs.

I f the New Deal and the rise in interest in communism and socialism during the
depression was in reaction to a capitalist system run amuck that had failed the
majority of Americans and was, in most peoples minds, the root cause of the depression,
then the post-war McCarthy witch-hunt was right-wing America’s revenge! Thousands
of Americans were caught up in the web of suspicion; and anyone who might have toyed
with socialism or communism before the war was fair game. Imagine the fate of a
recently celebrated, well-known author, a closeted gay, Mexican-American man, living in
Ashville, North Carolina, who had been associated with Diego Rivera, Freda Kaylo (both
self-declared communists) and had served as secretary to the Russian revolutionary
leader, Leon Trotsky. This is Shepherd’s fate. Questioned by the FBI, shunned by
friends and neighbors, summoned by the ‘House Subcommittee on un-American
Activities’, his publishing contracts cancelled – this is what Shepherd faces during the
final chapters of ‘The Lacuna’. All that is missing from newspaper accounts is the truth.
Slowly, the noose closes in around him. Death seems the only escape.

So. Harrison Shepherd is a Mexican-American boy who grows to become a celebrated

American writer of historical novels that recreate Aztec and Mayan culture. He bounces
between the US and Mexico. His mother runs off with him to Isle Pixol, Mexico, and
then sends him back to Washington, (or as Freda Kahlo sardonically refers to it, “Throne

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 ‘The Lacuna’ by Barbara Kingsolver

of the kingdom of Gringolandia”), then back to Mexico, then back to the US, settling for
a time in Ashville, North Carolina, (home town of author Tom Wolfe and the Biltmore
estate of George Vanderbilt) where he lives from about 1940s until 1951. In 1951 he
disappears – presumably, suicide by drowning – during a surreptitious return visit to Isla
Pixol, Mexico.

As I said at the outset, the title, ‘The Lacuna,’ represents many things. The most obvious
is the cave on Isla Pixol. It also refers to a missing journal that turns up after Shepherd’s
death. But it seems to stand, also, for the missing history of the Aztecs and Mayans,
whose monuments and hieroglyphs are all that remain of a rich, vibrant culture. And it
stands for the truth that so often is missing from news accounts of events and the lives
and of people we think we know, but superficially. The recurring theme of the book is
expressed this way: “That you can’t really know the person standing before you, because
always there is some missing piece.” Whether describing historical figures such as
Rivera, Freda or Trotsky, or describing fictional characters such as Shepherd or even his
own Mother, or Violet Brown, our understanding of them is only an approximation.

In form, the novel is a brilliant construction. The first chapter is memoir. The remainder
consists of a series of journals and “archivist notes”, published “posthumously” fifty
years after Shepherd’s reported death. The first chapter is written and abandoned in the
late 1940s by Shepherd himself, by then a successful author. The memoir was begun
reluctantly at the urging of his determined assistant, Violet Brown. The “Lacuna,” here
referring to a missing 2nd journal, is Shepherd’s excuse for abandoning the project. But,
at this stage in our nation’s history, there is a darker secret he is reluctant to expose.
Violet Brown, seventeen years older than Shepherd, becomes the “Archivists” in the
novel, posthumously editing his journals for publication. At a time when the FBI is
pursuing Shepherd in the late 1940s, he instructs Violet to burn all of his journals, but she
secretly saves them by pretending to burn them in the backyard of his Ashville home, and
then hiding them at her rooming house. Upon Freda’s death in 1954, Violet receives the
missing 2nd journal. This contains a crucial detail of his early years on Isla Pixol that
resolves the mystery of his “death” and, consequently, provides great comfort to Violet,
for he has certainly become the ‘lacuna’ in her heart.

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 ‘The Lacuna’ by Barbara Kingsolver

Barbara Kingsolver has sewn history and fiction together so skillfully, it’s impossible to
see the seams. ‘The Lacuna’ is a brilliant work – rich in imaginative, descriptive
language, humor, characters and pitch-perfect dialogue. You will linger over dazzling
passages, tossing them around on your tongue. It’s also alive with something more
difficult to describe – organic relationships that grow out of intimate knowledge,
acceptance, and devotion. This is the perfect “slow read” – a book that you’ll want to go
through with a highlighter and spend hours returning to the passages that gave you
pleasure. I included just a few of the hundreds I highlighted to illustrate my point, but
repeating them out of context only diminishes their effect, so I’ll close by simply saying,
read this book slowly. It will delight you.

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