An American family suffers in ‘Unsheltered’
The world is crashing down on Willa, the hero of Barbara Kingsolver’s earnest and ambitious new novel, “Unsheltered” (Harper, 496 pp.,
Journalism cutbacks have ravaged her income. Her professor husband, Iano, lost tenure when his university became insolvent. Their son’s wife has killed herself, leaving behind an infant child. Their daughter is skeptically re-entering American life after a stint in Cuba. Iano’s emphysemic father is a bigoted fan of the “Bullhorn” running for president in 2016. And their New Jersey home, built in the 1870s, is rapidly collapsing.
“How could two hardworking people do everything right in life and arrive in their fifties essentially destitute?” Willa thinks.
Kingsolver doesn’t want you to read that line solely as a cry of despair. She takes the question seriously: What forces threaten to wreck the American family, and what can help stave them off ? To answer that, Kingsolver alternates her narrative between 2016 and 1874, where on the same patch of Pine Barrens land a schoolteacher named Thatcher is befriending Mary Treat.
Mary, based on a real person, is an uncredentialed but serious naturalist who has published widely and corresponds with Charles Darwin. But accepting the theory of evolution is all but a crime in town. Cutler, headmaster of Thatcher’s school, thunders on creationism’s behalf, backed by a mayor who treats the town like a fiefdom.
“When men fear the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore the old order,” Treat intones.
Kingsolver’s point is clear: The American experiment, then and now, frays whenever its most fearful citizens take comfort in their own ignorance. Kingsolver, a biologist by training, has been attacking myths about the just-so nuclear family since her
1988 debut, “The Bean Trees,” and most powerfully in 1998’s “The Poisonwood Bible.”
“Unsheltered” works similar thematic turf, and it has the virtues of her best fiction: a compassionate portrait of parenthood in all its complexity, rich historical detail and a gift for a piercing satirical line.
But the novel also is Kingsolver at her most didactic. Willa’s children arguing over global economic policy resembles the lukewarm banter of a thinktank podcast, and extended debates between Thatcher and Cutler are cartoonishly binary. Only the rules of historical fiction prevent Kingsolver from slapping a MAGA cap on Cutler’s head.
The book’s title suggests a roof gone missing. But it also is a resonant call to be more alert to our social predicaments, to “stand in the clear light of day.”