The Lacuna
by Barbara Kingsolver
Summary
Harrison Shepherd is a boy nobody claims: American father in Washington, Mexican mother towing him through her love affairs, an education abandoned in both countries. What he can do is cook, and keep a notebook, and in 1930s Mexico City those skills carry him into the most dangerous household imaginable: mixing plaster and baking bread for Diego Rivera, falling under the spell of Frida Kahlo, and staying on as cook and typist when the household takes in its famous fugitive guest, Leon Trotsky. Shepherd is in the compound through the first machine gun raid and is nearby when the ice axe finds Trotsky in 1940, and the experience teaches him the lesson that shapes his life: be the one nobody notices.
He moves to Asheville, North Carolina, becomes a bestselling novelist of ancient Mexico, and hires Violet Brown, a widowed stenographer whose loyalty outlasts his own instructions. It does not save him. In the McCarthy years the Rivera kitchen becomes a dossier, and Kingsolver stages the House Un-American Activities Committee machinery, the clippings, the hearings, the beautiful non sequiturs of accusation, against a man whose whole art has been silence. The title names the gaps: a missing notebook, an underwater cave on the Mexican coast, and the hole in the record through which, in the last pages, a life may or may not escape.
Told entirely through diaries, letters and clippings that Violet Brown has preserved against orders.
Around five hundred pages.
Best for readers who want Kahlo, Trotsky and the Red Scare threaded onto one invented life, and who like an archive with secrets in it.
Historical Context & Significance
The Lacuna won the Orange Prize in 2010. Reviews on publication were respectful rather than rapturous, some finding the first Mexican half so vivid that the quiet Asheville half suffered by comparison, and the prize functioned as a corrective, the judges backing the design of the whole over the dazzle of the parts.
Barbara Kingsolver was already one of America's most read serious novelists, with The Poisonwood Bible her presumed masterpiece, and her political engagements fully on record; The Lacuna is the most direct her fiction has been about her own country's appetite for loyalty tests, written during the security state's post 2001 expansion and set in its 1950 rehearsal.
The prize turned out to be a first instalment: in 2023 Demon Copperhead won her the Women's Prize again, making her its first double winner, and that book's Appalachia is visible from this one's Asheville. Few careers have been honoured at both ends of a thirteen year gap by the same award.