President prowls through the pages
Unsheltered, by Barbara Kingsolver, Faber Fiction, $59.99. Reviewed by Ron Charles.
Non-fiction writers began publishing books about Donald Trump even before Sean Spicer could start lying for him. Fiction writers, though, have been slower to incorporate the mogul into their work. That stands to reason. After all, novels are lumbering beasts next to fleet-footed books of political non-fiction. And, besides, many fiction writers are wary of dating their stories with contemporary details.
Here comes the first major novel to tackle the Trump era straight on and place it in the larger chronicle of existential threats.
Donald Trump’s name doesn’t appear in Barbara Kingsolver’s Unsheltered, but the president prowls all through these pages.
He’s ‘‘the Bullhorn,’’ ‘‘the tyrant who promises to restore the old order,’’ the ‘‘billionaire running for president who’s never lifted a finger,’’ the candidate who brags that ‘‘he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and people would still vote for him.’’
That may sound like the makings of a deadly polemical novel, a strident op-ed stretched out for more than 450 pages. But Unsheltered is not that – or it’s not just that – largely because Kingsolver has constructed this book as two interlaced stories, separated by more than a century.
Her alternating structure suggests that Trump is not unique but merely the latest outbreak of a virus that periodically infects America.
The contemporary story in Unsheltered offers a collage of Democratic talking points acted out in the lives of a middle-class family slipping down the ladder of success.
The heroine, Willa Knox, is a freelance journalist burdened with the care of her baby grandson and her right-wing father-in-law.
As the novel opens, this extended family has just moved to Vineland, New Jersey, into a collapsing house that serves as their precarious shelter and a very sturdy metaphor.
Willa and her husband, a college professor, worked hard but are now close enough to retirement to realise that no retirement awaits them.
Upheavals in publishing and higher education have knocked their income back to starting-level salaries.
The absurd mess of American health insurance confounds every effort to get Willa’s father-in-law the care he needs. Her brilliant son is hobbled by more than $100,000 in student loans. And her daughter has become a dumpster-diving
Cassandra, convinced that modern capitalism is warming the planet towards incineration.
If those details aren’t sufficiently indicative of what ails America, these characters often look directly into the camera and say things like, ‘‘Per capita GDP in the US has been pretty stagnant, Dad. You know that, right? Income used to be tied to productivity of the economy but that hasn’t been true since 1978. Actually, it’s gone the other way since then. There’s different ways to chart it against inflation, but the median paycheck is definitely in decline.’’
Although Willa and her family are sympathetic characters, there’s something a little claustrophobic about being confined within these axioms of liberal orthodoxy.
I’m in perfect agreement with every position Kingsolver advocates, but when does one dare object to the heavy hand of editorial determinism?
Only late in the novel do some of these characters seem to break free from their thematic function, and begin to consider in more conflicted and nuanced ways a life outside the capitalist furnace of consumption.
Ironically, the alternate chapters of Unsheltered, set in the 1870s, are fresher and more rewarding. In the hope of earning a historical preservation grant for her crumbling house, Willa begins to research its earliest inhabitants.
At this point, Kingsolver takes us back to the origins of Vineland, an actual utopian community founded by Charles Landis, a Trumpian real estate developer who really did shoot someone and get away with it.
Among the citizens of Vineland was Mary Treat, a self-taught naturalist who corresponded with Charles Darwin and supported herself as a science writer.
Kingsolver brings Treat to life in all her impressive brilliance and delightful eccentricity. The Civil War has left America craving nostalgia and spiritualism, while new social attitudes and scientific discoveries threaten to shatter every cherished ideal.
Travelling side by side, 140 years apart, these alternating stories maintain their distinctive tones but echo one another in curious, provocative ways.
Kingsolver suggests that it’s never been easy to find oneself unsheltered, cast out from the comforts of old beliefs about how the world works.
If there’s any spark of optimism in this grim prognosis for our survival, it’s implied by the novel’s parallel structure: we’ve adapted before. With a little creative thinking and courage, we might do so again.