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| The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver This long-awaited novel recalls a dangerous era for artists. By Maya JaggiBarbara Kingsolver's first novel in nine years takes a huge risk in venturing into copiously charted territory. It moves from the muralists and surrealists of the 1930s in the aftermath of the Mexican revolution to the McCarthyite witch-hunt of artists in the late 40s and 50s. Yet in crossing and recrossing the US-Mexican border, as novelists such as Carlos Fuentes have done before her, this novel reveals a singular ambition. It probes, with only partial success, the source of the vexed historical relationship between art and politics in the United States, as well as the gap between a life lived and a life reported.The life in question is that of Harrison William Shepherd, variously dubbed Will, Harry and InsĂłlito. Born in Virginia of an American "bean counter" and a Mexican flapper, he is raised in both countries, eventually becoming the celebrated author of American potboilers about the Aztecs. Shepherd's story opens engagingly with his boyhood in Isla Pixol, an island south of Veracruz, in a Mexico scented with "jasmine, dog piss, cilantro, lime". But the story comes to us in the elusive form of diaries and memoirs, letters and press cuttings. Locked for 50 years in a bank vault until all parties are dead, these fragments were saved by the novelist's stenographer, Violet Brown, from his despairing wish that they be burned.Kingsolver meticulously inserts the fictional Shepherd into pivotal moments of recorded history, using both fictional and actual newspaper reports. As a youth in Mexico City, he sees a tiny woman of regal bearing, her hair "braided in a heavy crown", buying parrots in the street, and becomes a plaster-mixer and cook to her husband, Diego Rivera. Present as Frida Kahlo despairs of Rivera's infidelities and as Lev Trotsky seeks refuge with the revolutionary artist from Stalin's assassins, Shepherd becomes Kahlo's sometime spy and Trotsky's cook and secretary. As a naive and humble typist he plays a bit part in the rift between Trotsky and Rivera, and in Trotsky's murder. Back in the US, as the cold war hots up, these associations draw the scrutiny of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Shepherd's fate seems sealed by the view of a character in one of his novels that "Our leader is an empty sack . . ." – words that the novelist cannot truthfully deny are his own.According to Violet, Shepherd was "averse to making himself known. Even when greatly misunderstood". The novel is at its best in the oblique revelation of this man, with his lacunae of privacy and passion. The young writer is an acute observer whose watchfulness derives partly from his itinerant upbringing – as a "double person made of two different boxes" – and his discreet sexuality. Guilt-ridden for failing to avert his boss's death, and disqualified from US military service for "sexual indifference to the female of the species" ("blue slip"), he spends the second world war couriering paintings to safety for the US state department.In a spiky satire on press presumption, the novel points up the disparity between this man and the persona later ascribed to him as a treacherous "art smuggler, womaniser". A research trip to MĂ©rida with his stenographer, an older woman, is written up in the papers as a "January-May romance". Even his sometime lover, Tom Cuddy, deserts him for his reported lack of patriotism. Yet while "lies are infinite in number and the truth so small and singular", the novel also witnesses the advent of celebrities who control and manipulate their own image. Kahlo, garbed as Mexican peasant or Aztec queen, says: "If I don't choose, they choose for me . . . The newspapers would wrap me in gauze and make me a martyred angel, or else a boring jealous wife."Shepherd's interest as a novelist is in "how civilisations fall, and what leads up to that. How we're connected to everything in the past". His lawyer, Arthur Gold, sees anti-communist persecution, not least of artists, as putting poison on the lawn. "It kills your crabgrass all right, and then you have a lot of dead stuff out there for a very long time. Maybe for ever." Kingsolver, who has spoken in a recent US interview of a post-9/11 backlash "against my identity as a political artist", offers a timely re-reminder – for those who need it – of an era when surrealist art could be condemned as "un-American", and foreigners deported for "working for Negro rights". Nor might an undead red spectre from the 50s be lost on an Obama administration mooting healthcare reform: "If Truman calls for any change, education improvements, or Social Security, a chorus shouts him down – welfare state, collectivism, conspiracy."Yet the novel's later sections are marred by overstated irony, the dialogue too often staged between characters who agree, making for an authorial soapbox. More satisfying is an unexpectedly touching coda, in which the quietly besotted Violet keeps faith with the condemned man ("they'll go to the ends of the earth to haul back people they've declared unfit to be Americans," she notes), and a surprise lacuna holds out hope of escape.FictionFrida KahloMaya Jaggiguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Book Calls Jewish People an ‘Invention’ The book by Shlomo Sand, which mixes respected scholarship with dubious theories, spent months on the best-seller list in Israel and is now available in English. feeds.nytimes.com |
John Storm Roberts, World-Music Scholar, Dies at 73 Mr. Roberts was an English-born writer, record producer and independent scholar whose work explored the rich ways African and Latin American music influenced the United States. feeds.nytimes.com |
Comeback Planned for Girls’ Book Series Scholastic Inc. plans to reissue repackaged versions of the first two volumes of “The Baby-Sitters Club,” in the hopes of igniting enthusiasm in a new generation of readers. feeds.nytimes.com |
The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart by M Glenn Taylor Patrick McCabe is captivated by M Glenn Taylor's debut novel, located in the badlands of West VirginiaThere was rain when I heard it, smacking off the ground. But when the steam began to rise I saw her, singing on a crude wooden platform in a cable-knit sweater, eyes firmly closed, and she was like nothing I had ever encountered before. Which was not in itself surprising, because in the little town where I grew up chicks, as such ladies were termed in those innocent beatnik times, rarely bothered to drop by, much less sing eerie ballads like "O Death" in the town square. No, but for a sweater girl in skyblue Levi's on that unique Fleadh Cheoil day in 1968, any information we required regarding child-stranglers, labour agitators or the callous dispatch of lovers we would jolly well have had to find out for ourselves.At the time, I wasn't all that familiar with the history of the ballad form, but very soon was excavating Americana's buried gold, devouring everything folk archivist and ballad anthologiser Harry Smith had ever assembled. A great number of those songs might well have come from M Glenn Taylor's native Virginia, the location for much of this athletic and often amusing debut novel. In subject matter it's akin to the movie Little Big Man, certainly; but make no mistake, The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart creates and sustains its very own world, robustly catechising more than a century of American life as it bowls its narrative hoop along the epic inner lives of the so-called dirt-poor. At times it even chuckles as its characters depart this world of hilarious confusion where, as Carson McCullers has suggested, the system of values is so uncertain that it can be difficult to Âdecide between the worth of a man and a load of hay.In the best of American southern ballads, as so often with the literature and here in Taylor's galloping, defiant epic, there is a fusion of anguish, farce and dumb perplexity comparable to that one finds in Gogol. A frank acknowledgment of the sheer, baffling variety of the fantastic human circus combines with baroque colloquies and casual inventories of misery detailing the high-wire contradictions of being alive and on our way to our coffins. These catalogues of disasters are apprehended in almost obsessive detail, caught in the loop of the oral lasso.The "cruelty" of which Southerners have been accused, writes McCullers, is at bottom only a sort of naivety, an acceptance of spiritual inconsistencies without asking the reason why.There are, of course, many "souths". Taylor's novel is a virtuoso performance delivered in the high, lonesome style of the Appalachian highlands, setting off at a fair lick in 1903 and rattling furiously along until it arrives in our own Cain-raising times. And we find ourselves dizzy in the afterglow of this life-affirming fib, the tale of a 108-year-old orphan, a survivor from the hills who sips moonshine and grows up fast, whether he's handling snakes, pleasuring women or, long after the coal wars, sewing his own mouth up. And like all outlaws, he eventually comes home – as if no war "had ever bloodied the ground beneath him"."The boy was full of rotten teeth but his eye was keen and sure," we're told, which latter sentiment might describe the book itself. For the scope of ambition within these pages is commendable, and if it flags just a little in the final third (the ballad form should always recruit brevity as its collaborator) it would be churlish to carp. For Trenchmouth is a dervish cat o'nine tails, which in its confidence can leave one gasping, as in the section where the shape-shifting protagonist, at once an inventor, "cunnilinguist" and sniper, fetches up in the coal wars of West Virginia. This bandit tale is vigorous and sincere, located squarely in the tradition of Twain, Faulkner and McCullers. It is both real and unreal, with its so-called grotesques functioning as unchanging aspects of human frailty, just as the forgotten dusty cabin in McCullers's The Ballad of the Sad CafĂ© may be seen as nothing less than the locked sarcophagus of the closed-down human heart.Happily, The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart introduces a writer who is not in the least afraid of tradition, embracing an ancient and noble form and, like all fine artists, reinventing it while he is at it. His second novel, The Marrowbone Marble Company, is soon to be published in the US. If it's anything like this, I look forward to its company, with a smile on my face and a jar of the sweetest Appalachian moonshine at my knee.Patrick McCabe's books include The Butcher Boy (Picador).FictionPatrick McCabeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |