Books
Barbara Kingsolver likes to tackle the big issues, but always also creates page-turning plots.
Barbara Kingsolver on her latest novel, Unsheltered
Barbara Kingsolver writes the kind of books that almost shouldn’t be fashionable. Page-turners stuffed full of big ideas. Novels that wrestle with serious subjects lightly, that tackle issues as varied as poverty, the environment, religion and the way in which we live now in a rapidly collapsing world. These are books determined to engage with the world; novels which owe as much to the Victorian greats such as Charles Dickens and George Eliot as they do to more recent influences. They are also hugely successful, as likely to top the bestseller lists as they are to win literary prizes, and Kingsolver, 63, says that the accessibility is key.
“It’s always interested me that critics looks askance at a woman who wants to tackle ambitious subjects,” she says. “The novels that thrilled me when I was growing up were Moby Dick and Great Expectations and Middlemarch and so I also wanted to write novels that tackled conflict on a global scale. Yet I’d regularly bump up against critics who said basically a woman is not allowed to do that; a woman is allowed to write about conflict at the level of the grocery store or the marriage. Well, screw that. But while I want to tackle ambitious subjects I also want to make them accessible, I want the reader to have reason to turn every page and I don’t think those two things are incompatible.”
This ability to weave together personal stories and major themes is central to the appeal of her new novel Unsheltered, which uses two timelines to tell a story of the realities of life in very different but equally uncertain times. In 2016, journalist Willa, her job security vanished, attempts to hold her family together as societal and financial norms crumble around her. In 1871, young science teacher Thatcher struggles with the realisation that the utopian community he has moved to is in reality anything but. The result is a powerful and page-turning story about relationships and families, and the contracts we make, both with each other and ourselves, about the communities we are born into and those we make.
It feels particularly resonant in today’s febrile climate, although Kingsolver says the germs of the idea were born five years previously when she began to think that “so many of our familiar shelters were failing us and at so many levels, the economic, the social… basic things like the job at the end of college, medical care when you need it, but also bigger things like will the ice in the glaciers stay frozen? None of this is a given. There is a great unravelling and it is affecting working people of all kinds.”
The novel’s setting in middleclass New Jersey is something of a departure for a writer who grew up and still lives in rural Appalachia and admits she sees it as “part of my mission to represent my people and tell their stories to counter the myth and reductionism and oversimplifications of rural life”.
She says: “It’s the first time in a while that I’ve written about middle-class poverty as opposed to rural poverty, but I felt that I had to examine the problem in this way because it’s too easy for Americans to say, ‘Well, yes the poor people have their problems’, but the fact is that the problem has arrived smack in the lap of the middle classes,” she says. “There’s a sense that the [American] dream has failed but we’re still hanging on to it and refusing to listen. That’s what I wanted to write about.”
All of which might make for a depressing read were it not for the fact that Kingsolver tells her story with wit and warmth, with a subplot involving Willa’s idealistic daughter Tig being particularly resonant. “Unsheltered is really my love letter to Millennials,” she says. “I have two Millennial daughters whom I watch with such respect navigating a world that’s so different from the one I came up in, in which there are no guarantees.”
Perhaps because of that she remains hopeful that the recent US elections will usher in a much-needed era of change. She says: “It’s been clear to me for a while now that today’s problems are not going to be solved by yesterday’s people, but thankfully what we’re seeing is a whole generation of young people realise that they can make their own world.
“State houses all over the country are now full of young people in their thirties and twenties who five years ago would not have dreamed of going into politics. There’s something incredibly exciting about that.” ■
I want to tackle ambitious subjects but I also want the reader to have reason to turn every page
Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver is out now published by Faber & Faber