The radio is at the root of the evil, their rule is: No silence, ever. When anything happens, the commentator has to speak without a moment's pause for gathering wisdom. Falsehood and inanity are preferable to silence. You can't imagine the effect of this. The talkers are rising above the thinkers.
"Well, five years of wartime censorship. Old habits die hard. We've gotten good at pretending everything is shipshape here. Don't you feel this way?"
I have two confessions to make before I begin. First, I had to look up the word "lacuna." I felt sure I'd encountered it before, but had absolutely no memory of what it might mean. A lacuna is a piece left out of a manuscript. This has several layers of meaning in the book. Second, I almost put this book down as soon as I'd begun. The book is about Mexico, and I simply don't find Mexico as romantic or intriguing as, say, France. However, because I have the utmost regard for Barbara Kingsolver, I decided to persevere.
The book begins with Harrison Shepherd and his mother huddling together, fearing for their lives on a little island in Mexico, a terrible howling threatening their existence. The howling turns out to be harmless monkeys, gathering in the jungle for a little morning cacophony. Harrison's mother has uprooted him at the age of twelve, moving him from Virginia to Mexico. She has left his father to live as the mistress of a married Mexican diplomat. Harrison calls him Mr. Produce the Cash. Harrison's mother is a flapper, an alcoholic, and extremely immature. She lives to be admired and only appreciates her son inasmuch as he can feed her ego.
When Mr. Produce the Cash fails to produce the cash, Harrison's mother takes in sewing and Harrison fends for himself, first as a plaster mixer, then a cook, for Diego Rivera. Ignorant of Mexican culture, I had to look up Diego Rivera. He is famous for his murals and his politics. He was a communist, a revolutionary, and sheltered Leon Trotsky in exile for a number of years. His wife Frida was also an artist. Harrison works for the Riveras not only as a cook, but as a secretary, translator, driver, and sometimes confidant. Despite, or maybe because, of his lack of filial relationship with his mother, both the Riveras and Trotskys take Harrison under their wings as a son. The story begins in 1929 and continues to 1949, and you may have already realized, as I didn't, that communism plays a large role later in the book, after WWII. Living in Mexico during the revolution, to Harrison, communism was a natural part of life, something he accepted without thinking. In that day, of course, it didn't carry the same stigma it did in the late '40's, and even now.
After Trotsky's assassination, Harrison is at loose ends. The police confiscate the notebooks he has kept since he first moved to Mexico (at the insistence of his mother, for posterity's sake, later for his own sake), as well as the manuscript for his first novel (begun at the insistence of Frida). Frida sends Harrison (Insolito, or Soli, as she calls him) to New York to accompany her paintings. She also sends a painting for Harrison to keep. Harrison, after delivering the paintings, winds up randomly in Asheville, NC. He moves into a boarding house, becomes their cook, and eventually ends up working for the State Department (WWII has commenced, but for reasons unknown until later, Harrison is unfit for military service) moving art objects out of danger.
A couple years later, Harrison begins writing again, becomes quite the successful popular author, hires a stenographer, Violet Brown. As you can see, there is a theme of strong women dominating Harrison throughout the book. Violet isn't so obviously domineering as Harrison's mother or Frida; she exerts a more quiet control. Harrison and Violet live a happy, rather insular life until the rise of "better dead than red." Harrison's past in Mexico as a servant to Rivera and Trotsky comes back to haunt him, and he is prosecuted as a communist. He returns to Mexico with Violet, and the story ends there in the only way it possibly could.
Frida teaches Harrison, "Soli," that the most important part of a person is that which is hidden. She hides a leg shriveled from polio; Harrison hides parts of himself from everybody he meets. He destroys one of his notebooks and that becomes another lacuna. Harrison, as a child, discovers an underwater cave called a lacuna. Kingsolver, throughout the book, leaves out facts on a continual basis, hinting that all will be explained later. Maybe. And it is. Sort of. Kingsolver does not patronize her readers by tying everything up in a neat little bow, explaining everything in minute detail; instead she allows the lacunae to speak for themselves. The book has all sorts of twists and turns, or at least it seems like it at first. Actually, once the twists arrive, you find yourself thinking, "Oh, of course. What else could have happened? I should have seen that."
Throughout the second half of the book, the half mostly set in America, the half with the red scare and Iron Curtain and Un-American committees, I kept thinking of E.L. Doctorow's
The Book of Daniel. It's about McCarthyism and the Rosenbergs, a couple accused of being communist spies. In that book, you're never quite sure 1)if they're actually guilty, or 2)who, ultimately, is in the wrong: the Rosenbergs or the government? In
Lacuna, the culprit is obviously the American government. Or maybe it goes further back, to WWII, or to that part of human nature willing to listen and believe, rather than think. (See above quotation from the book.) The message of this book is definitely, at least in part, to think. To look past to what is obvious and apparent to that which is below the surface, because that is, as Frida, Harrison, and Violet constantly tell us, is what is most important. Lessons learned about communism (we learn that communism and anti-communism are completely unrelated) can definitely apply to Islam. Xenophobia rules our country because we listen to the commentary without wisdom.
I can't believe I almost didn't read this book because it was about Mexico.
