Next week, Barbara Kingsolver's first novel in nine years will be published: The Lacuna, which follows an American boy who grows up in Mexico, works for Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, meets Leon Trotsky, witnesses social revolution in two countries, and becomes a celebrated writer who is caught up in "a McCarthy-foreshadowing scandal fomented and distorted by rabid media," according to The Minneapolis Star Tribune.
I'll be honest: I have always much preferred Kingsolver's nonfiction to her fiction. The essays in Small Wonder and High Tide in Tucson are marvelous and nuanced and honest; meanwhile, the novel Pigs in Heaven, for example, is grounded on a fascinating dilemma, but its fictional execution felt forced and the characters, props.
But nonetheless, this new novel does sound interesting.
Of course, in the near-decade of Kingsolver's fiction sabbatical, she's hardly been lolling around and waiting for a muse. She published three nonfiction books and became a farmer; the merging of her writing and her life in the natural world merged with the publication of the immensely popular Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, which Kingsolver describes as a rare moment when she was actually found herself leading a trend.
The Star Tribune has a great profile on Kingsolver:
In the world of arts and letters, Kingsolver is viewed as an activist as much as she is a writer, with dual aims similar to those of author and social critic John Steinbeck. History and folklore professor Bill Ferris, who chaired the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2000 when the organization recognized Kingsolver, describes the author as a "modest, gentle person" whose writing he sees as "a force for social action. She connects her work with public issues as a force for good. Most writers write for themselves, and I don't argue with that, but Barbara feels that as an artist if she can't improve on life around her, then her craft is for naught."
From the newspaper profile's multimedia features:
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