Indulging her passions for artists and politics

Connie Ogle

Nov. 7, 2009 (McClatchy-Tribune Regional News delivered by Newstex) -- Barbara Kingsolver jokes that whenever she publishes a novel she apparently turns into a railway station because, according to reviewers, "I only do departures."

But while all of Kingsolver's books reflect a shimmering set of sensibilities, her latest novel stands a bit apart from her beloved debut The Bean Trees, its sequel Pigs in Heaven and other humorous and heartbreaking female-driven works about family and identity. The Lacuna (Harper, $26.99), which Kingsolver will discuss Monday at Miami Book Fair International, deals with those themes, too. But it delves even deeper into politics and national identity.

Set in the early-to-mid 20th century in Mexico and the United States, it's narrated by Harrison William Shepherd, a necessarily closeted gay writer who, as a youth, works in the households of Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and "Lev" Trotsky.

The Lacuna isn't exactly Kingsolver's first historical novel. The spellbinding The Poisonwood Bible -- about an evangelical missionary and his family -- was set in the Congo in 1959, before independence. But The Lacuna's wider historical sprawl proved trickier to pin down.

"The Poisonwood Bible required a lot of research, but this was 40 times more," Kingsolver says from her Virginia home. "It stretches across 30 years. Every new day in this novel required another month or two of research. That's why it took seven years."

COMPLEX ISSUE

Kingsolver says she was lured to the subject matter by a long-held passion for studying the complex relationship between art and politics.

"It fascinates me that countries have different attitudes toward artists, in terms of what we want to hear from them," she says. "Many countries look to artists as bellwethers of the political and moral climate of their times. Mexico notably celebrates its most political artists as national heroes. In the United States we're uneasy with dissident art. I don't want to say we don't allow it. We do. But there's a kind of skepticism of political art that's unique to this country. . . . What makes us uneasy?"

Kingsolver has dipped into hot-button issues before. In her nonfiction Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, she writes about her family's year of eating only local or home-grown food. A character in the novel Animal Dreams fights for social justice in Nicaragua. And Prodigal Summer tackles biology, farming and the respecting and honoring of the natural world.

She "inspired me to write about things that make a difference," says novelist A. Manette Ansay, professor in the University of Miami's M.F.A. creative writing program and author, most recently, of Good Things I Wish You. "I heard her speak while I was in graduate school at Cornell University. She read from The Bean Trees and also from a book of nonfiction, Holding the Line, about the role of women in the 1983 Arizona mine strike. Her passion was so unapologetically straightforward and plainspoken that it really cheered me up. I was new to academia at the time, developing something of the cynical patina that is often confused with intellectualism, and she was so smart and fresh and bright she really set me straight."

Questions reflected in The Lacuna -- the enigmatic title refers first to a gap in a rocky shoreline and then to the hole, the mysterious part, that lurks in every story -- began to arise after 9/11.

SELF-EXAMINATION

"It began to dawn on me we may be uneasy with self-examination in general. . . . A few people were saying, 'This is an opportunity for us to examine our role in the world. Let's think about being our best moral selves,' and the national mood was 'Shut up about that.' Self-examination did not extend beyond 'You are with us or against us' or 'Love it or leave it.' That was a threatening time, and it's expected we'd fall back on the most comfortable position, but why is that the most comfortable position? That would be to say we are a finished product, that we are not a work in progress. . . . I became fascinated with that because my experience in Mexico was very different. Self-criticism is a national pastime there."

And so poor Harrison Shepherd, half Mexican, half American, so mesmerized by his larger-than-life employers, grows up and moves back to the United States. He writes a few bestsellers before he's caught up in McCarthy-era investigations, which "I think left us with a legacy of caution or fear," Kingsolver says.

Still, she finds much that's admirable in examining our history. During World War II, she says, we sacrificed readily.

"People went five years without buying cars or wristwatches or bed sheets or meat. People are freaking out now, because they're trying to make health care more fair. Imagine if we were told how much meat or cheese we could buy! Reining in our appetites for anything is unAmerican. But it's not necessarily who we are as a nation. It has come to be who we are in this moment, but if we look back in our history we have been better people than this, been more generous, more socially conscious, more considerate of the common good. . . . We can have many versions of the national character. If we go back through history maybe we find more choices as to who we are as a country."

"An Evening with Barbara Kingsolver" begins at 7:30 p.m. Monday in Chapman Conference Center.

Newstex ID: KRTB-0123-39531480