A lacuna is a black hole or space that interrupts text or artwork, making it difficult for the observer to interpret the document's meaning. Although it literally means "lake," a lacuna usually refers to paper or papyrus that has flaked off an ancient scroll leaving a historian guessing about the words or hieroglyphics that might have stood in its place. Without knowing what the Egyptian priestess did to please her god, a befuddled scholar might be tempted to make something up. Maybe. The lacuna is a troublesome bit of mystery, always underscoring the fragility of humanity's works under the rough press of time.
Barbara Kingsolver, in her latest thoughtful and troubling novel, looks at a lacuna from all sides, seeing it as both a problem and as a possible hiding place. In Lacuna, her protagonist, Harrison Shepherd, a boy who will grow up to become a novelist, discovers a most enticing underwater cave that parts like the mouth of a clam at the full moon. The boys in town call this cave a lacuna. But they claim you can never swim into it or you will drown. Young Shepherd finds that he doesn't dive to his demise, but finds a magical land at the other end. Yet knowing his mother will panic if he doesn't return directly, he glides back through the lacuna. He never forgets.
Kingsolver tells Shepherd's life story in a way that could have been needlessly complex in the hands of a less skilled writer. Shepherd's journals from boyhood and adulthood appear, often interrupted by secretary Violet Brown, who persuades Shepherd to continue with the biographical process. It's she who supplies a vital notebook that was missing — a very important lacuna in the complex tale of Harrison Shepherd. Then, the two wrangle back and forth until Brown wraps the story up for posterity in her tidy, white-gloved manner. Never once does the reader mistake Shepherd's rich language for Brown's precise tone, so exact is Kingsolver's attention to character. The result is a smooth biography of a bumpy time in our nation's history.
For anyone who thinks we now live in a time of shocking assaults on civil liberties, Lacuna is a vivid reminder of what our beleaguered Bill of Rights and Constitution went through during World War II and the Cold War. We like to think of our newspapers as spotless heralds of the truth; the vaunted members of the Fourth Estate. We can laugh along when Kingsolver plays with quaint little columns from the fictional small-town press. However, the joke isn't funny anymore when she trots out some really ugly, true material such as a vile, anti-Asian story on Japanese beetles in the garden, published by wholesome old Life magazine in 1944. Even the New York Times, our holier-than-thou, national newspaper of record is quoted as printing "2,541 Aliens Now in Custody," (Dec. 13, 1941), a piece that is all fact, but leaves a sense of vilifying Germans, Japanese, and Italians living in the United States. Think we've learned anything? What about the second Nigerian man who was led off a Detroit jetliner in handcuffs recently because he stayed in the bathroom too long? If he were white would there be any trouble? And what of Muslim-Americans? How fairly are they treated by the press?
Article comments
1 - Christy Corp-Minamiji
Nice review, Lynn. I'd been eyeing The Lacuna; now I know where that Christmas gift card is going! On a side note, I like that she's brought our country's abysmal history in civil liberties into the present. My husband's grandmother and family were interned during WWII, even while her husband was in the US Army in Europe. I agree that we are in grave danger of, once again, forgetting the past.
2 - Lynn Voedisch
She's all about the internment camps, Christy, along with just about every injustice you can imagine. What scares me is that the press went along with it--just as it did with the Iraq War. We woke up faster. But how are things going now for Muslim-Americans?
3 - brook Stableford
Barbara Kingsolver is speaking at a writers' conference Mexico in February 2010. Does anyone know anything about it? Someone mentioned in a reading group that she is going to speak and lead workshops at a conference. Does anyone know anything about it? Thanks. I want to go!