The Lacuna

American author Barbara Kingsolver’s sixth novel, The Lacuna, offers a version of historical fiction that combines fictional found primary sources with real historical events. Published in 2009, The Lacuna offers readers a glimpse into the mid-twentieth century from the perspective of a bit player – a bystander – whose ordinary experiences serendipitously intersect with the lives of major historical figures. By focusing on the way a completely unexceptional human perceives the large forces unfolding around him, Kingsolver dives into the difference between personal memories and publically significant events, asking who owns the story that is lived by both the famous and the ordinary.

Our protagonist is Harrison William Shepherd, a man whose life is divided between a period spent in Mexico and, later, life in the U.S. In keeping with this split, the book’s narrative technique changes from the third person to the first person.

The first part of the narrative is told in the third person, even though what we are ostensibly reading are Harrison’s own journals kept during his childhood. Harrison is born in 1917 in the U.S. to a somewhat ineffectual and intellectually stunted father and a Mexican mother who doesn’t view her marriage as permanent and is, instead, constantly on the make for a better and more affluent partner. In 1929, when Harrison is twelve, his mother has an affair with a wealthy Mexican businessman. Taking her son with her, she moves to Mexico to live on her boyfriend’s estate.



Harrison leads an almost completely directionless life; his mother pays him barely any attention. He passes his time swimming in the ocean and befriending the cooks in the estate kitchen, where the staff teaches him to prepare food and to bake as a way of keeping him occupied and out of trouble.

One day, Harrison has a stroke of incredible luck when he is sent on a series of errands and ends up running into the artist Frida Kahlo in a Mexico City marketplace. She is already famous at this point in history, married to the equally famous mural artist Diego Rivera. Kahlo takes to Harrison, and he ends up going to her house. There, the skills he learned from the cooks who taught him to knead and roll dough come in handy when he helps Rivera mix plaster.

One day turns into a job, and Harrison now spends his days both as a plasterer and as a cook for the Kahlo-Rivera household. As he and Kahlo grow closer and their friendship deepens, Harrison finds himself drawn to the history, culture, and art of the Aztecs.



In 1937, the household welcomes the former Soviet leader – and now a dissident hunted by Stalin – Leon Trotsky, after Kahlo and Rivera successfully petition the Mexican government to grant him asylum. Harrison’s duties now include being Trotsky’s secretary, putting himself at tremendous risk and entering the world of revolutionaries. In 1940, Trotsky is assassinated; the novel includes several real newspaper articles from the time to point out how much the “official story” differs from what actually happened.

At this point, the young adult Harrison returns to America. After briefly reconnecting with his father in Washington, DC, Harrison enrolls in a private school where his interest in writing is nurtured and brought out more fully.

The novel now switches gears, as Harrison starts narrating his life from a first-person point of view. Some time has passed, and Harrison is working as a novelist in Asheville, North Carolina. He also forms a close working relationship with Violet Brown, his empathic and pragmatic secretary.



Because of his past association with the Communist Trotsky and his ongoing friendship with Kahlo, Harrison is investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was established in 1938 to ferret out suspected Communist sympathizers and to uncover private citizens supposedly engaging in subversive activities. (We now know this period of paranoia as the Red Scare.)

Harrison is thrown by the intrusive and prosecutorial nature of the investigation – and here again, the novel inserts some contemporaneous newspaper clippings to show just how out of control and unreasonable the actions of this committee were. He decides to return to Mexico, instructs Violet to burn all of his papers, and spends the rest of his life in seclusion.

After his death, it is revealed that Violet has actually saved all of Harrison’s diaries and letters – and it is from this material that she has assembled this novel. Still, she reminds us, the act of reading what we are reading goes against the wishes of a private man. If we want to respect his ownership of his writing, we should refrain from reading this work.



Violet also explains the title of the book. “Lacunae” are gaps or missing pieces – and because this novel is comprised of writing that was never meant for publication, there are necessarily gaps in the story that keep the full Harrison from our knowledge. The idea of gaps is highlighted through the imagery of empty or unknown spaces that pervades the novel’s descriptions: we see lava tubes, blank spaces on a page, and even a part of the Mayan city Chichen Itza that is called the “mouth of the world.”

The novel received a mixed reaction upon publication, with some reviews tending to emphasize how much less significant it is than Kingsolver’s earlier work. Writing for NPR, Maureen Corrigan decrees that “the thing unintentionally missing here is an engaging main character,” calling Harrison far too ordinary to anchor this narrative. Nevertheless, in the Chicago Tribune, Carolyn Alessio states that the best part of the novel is the relationship between Harrison and Kahlo, full of “disarming repartees, both playful and heartbreaking, [which] are the soul of the novel.”