Unsheltered (2018)
By Barbara Kingsolver
Harper, 480 pages.
★★★
Barbara Kingsolver is always
worth reading, but she’s not written a truly great novel since Poisonwood Bible (1998). Alas, Unsheltered is not her long-awaited
return to literary glory. It’s a good book, but not a great one. Years ago the New Republic slammed her as the mistress
of “calamity writing.” That’s harsh, but it’s beyond dispute that Kingsolver seeks
to make proverbial Big Statements in Unsheltered.
On the surface, it’s a
simple setup: one badly constructed house, two families separated 140 years in
time, and one locale: Vineland, New Jersey. The setting was carefully chosen. Vineland
was the brainchild of utopian developer Charles K. Landis (1833-1900). In 1862,
Landis began building an alcohol-free town based on progressive educational and
political principles. As the name suggests, agriculture was to be the economic
driver of the town, especially grape production*. Landis appears in the 1875
part of Kingsolver’s novel, a time by which some residents–including journalist
Uri Carruth–had come to believe Landis’s middle initial stood for “King.”
Landis and Carruth are
historical figures, as is Mary Treat (1830-1923), a brilliant entomologist,
botanist, and faithful correspondent of Charles Darwin. Most Vineland residents
viewed her as eccentric, as women simply weren’t supposed to pursue such things
in Gilded Age America. Kingsolver’s main focus, though, is on Treat’s next-door
neighbors, the (fictional) Greenwoods. They live in a house that, like the
Gilded Age, looks respectable on the outside but is structurally unsound.
Thatcher is the poorly paid new science teacher who struggles to keep afloat a
household that includes his materialistic wife Rose, her spirited tomboy sister
Polly, and their snobbish widowed mother Aurelia. To make matters worse,
Thatcher teaches pure science in ways that outrage his Biblical literalist
colleague Cutler. Thatcher’s only solace is Mary, who introduces him to the
Pine Barrens as a plein air laboratory.
Kingsolver’s chapters alternate
between 1875 and 2014 and she’s good at parallelism. Our contemporary center of
attention is the Tavoularis clan. Like Thatcher Greenwood, Iano Tavoularis is a
struggling academic. He lives in Vineland because the college at which he was
tenured went under, and Vineland is a cheaper base from which to commute to Philadelphia
for an adjunct’s starvation wages. By the mid-20th century, post-industrial
Vineland was no utopia, and it certainly was not one in the wake of Hurricane
Sandy (2012). Iano and his wife Willa are ageing former hippies with two adult
children: Zeke, who wants to be an investor, and “Tig” (Antigone), a diminutive
fireball eco activist who thinks it’s probably too late to save the planet.
There is also Nick, Iano’s dying rightwing father, and Zeke’s baby, “Dusty,”
whose mother is deceased.
There are other examples of
parallelism. The Greenwoods have two dogs, Scylla and Charybdis. I’ll spare you
the detour into Greek mythology, but they are the origins of the phrase “between
a rock and a hard place.” Antigone’s name is also plucked from myth. The
irreconcilable worldviews of Zeke and Tig are analogous to disputes between blind
faith versus rational science explored in Thatcher’s Scopes Trial-like
tribunal, the sensational trial of Charles Landis, Nick’s talk radio parroting,
Willa’s quixotic quest to save her house, Zeke’s belief in money, and Tig’s
apocalyptic warnings.
Kingsolver’s novel is well
plotted, rich in detail, has well developed characters, and is an imaginative
blend of fiction and history, but it's pretty damn obvious in its use of metaphors.
The problematic house threatens to unshelter its inhabitants, but will it allow
them to “stand in the clear light of day…?” In Kingsolver’s telling, we have
the choice to follow convention or truth, unreason or fact, vanity or nature, and
those who tell us what we want to hear or scientists. Landis is a metaphor for
Donald Trump and in case you don’t get that Mary Treat remarks, “When men fear
the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore
all order.” Still uncertain? A Vineland mob harasses a defender of Darwin with
chants of, “Lock him up.”
I am part of the choir to
whom Kingsolver is preaching, but will she convince non-believers? Too much of Unsheltered is as subtle as a Facebook
rant. Her message that humankind’s house is falling down is advanced through long
sections whose didactic tone is similar to that found in Edward Bellamy’s famed
Looking Backward (1888). Big chunks
of the novel are informative, but the prose is limp.
Kingsolver also presents
either/or binaries. Perhaps she's right that the time for nuance is past but
then again, maybe she’s ambiguity-challenged. I admire her passion, but she
could trust her readers more instead of becoming the scientific scold to
Cutler’s evangelicalism or Willa’s idealism. I certainly wouldn’t dispute the
view that Planet Earth, like Vineland, has become Paradise Lost. But Kingsolver
doesn’t give us much space to dream that we might, in Joni Mitchell’s words,
get back to the garden.
Rob Weir
* Vineland was, for a time,
the major supplier for Welch’s Grape Juice.
