The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver (2009)
Blues book club met to discuss Barbara Kingsolver’s book, The Lacuna (2009). The discussion opened with the question: Who liked the book? Carolyn, Helena and I expressed our approval. Martha admitted, she didn’t like the book, so we led off with her. Martha didn’t relate to the character(s). She found the plot confusing. The book just didn’t hold her interest. NPR’s book critic Maureen Carrigan agreed.
Carolyn admitted that she, too, was frustrated with the novel’s opening section. Her interest in the use of narrators and narrative point of view grew as the structure of the novel unfolded. Carolyn also pondered the question of writing as a means of writing oneself. Does one exist through the word? Through writing?
I led off with my usual question: What’s the book about? In this case, the answer is simple. The book is about ‘lacuna.’ Images of lacuna as gap, passageway, cavity, void, recur throughout the novel. Lacuna as a metaphor for that which is missing, the missing piece, is the novel’s central image and theme.
The author states this in the following passage in which Violet Brown scolds the protagonist, Harrison Shepherd (HS) for not telling her of his 30th birthday. “A man turns thirty years, that’s important . . . and to think I sat here and knew nought of it, all the day long.”
HS reflects on this statement of knowing nought (a gap, lacuna). “I didn’t say what Frida would have (another gap). That you can’t really know the person standing before you, because always there is some missing piece: the birthday like an invisible piñata hanging great and silent over his head, as he stands in his slippers boiling the water for coffee. The scarred, shrunken leg hidden under a green silk dress. A wife and son back in France. Something you never knew. That is the heart of the story (325).”
Not only is ‘lacuna’ a central image and metaphor for the novel, it also forms the structure of the novel. The lacuna--that which is missing, something you never knew--gives the novel it shape, its structure. How? The lacuna gives the word, the written piece, its meaning, which in turn, determines its structure. Helen and Carolyn blinked at this. I’d lost them here.
Kingsolver cleverly lays this out. The content of the novel comes from a series of notebooks written by HS throughout his life. Fearing entrapment from the FBI, HS hurries to burn the notebooks. He watches at the window as his secretary, Violet Brown, carries out the deed. But she doesn’t burn all the notebooks, only one, “The Potomac Academy 1933” in which HS describes his first sexual encounter with a male friend. No one needs to know this, she reckons. But the others, she stashes in her mail bag.
After burning the notebooks, HS flees to Mexico to avoid arrest and disappears. Five years later, Violet receives a trunk from Frida Kalko containing various and sundry personal items belonging to HS, among them a notebook written by HS later in his life, that recounts his discovery, at age 12, of the lacuna on the island Isa Pixol. This notebook contains the key, the missing piece that brings the whole story into focus. Upon reading of HS’s discovery of the lacuna, Violet Brown knows what happened to her former employer. He is not dead. He didn’t kill himself. Instead, he returned to the island to escape through the lacuna to a new life. Rather than die, he chose to fight. This is confirmed by a cryptic note from Frida stating that HS is gone, but ‘some else is here.’ With this missing piece, Violet pieces together the narrative that forms the structure of the novel.
There were many other interesting facets to the book, but none more intriguing than Kingsolver’s brilliant use of ‘lacuna’ as both image and structure. I add my insight, perhaps shared by the author, that the two are really one and the same.
