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The Lacuna, in detail
The Lacuna follows Harrison William Shepherd, a half-Mexican, half-American man who in the 1930s works as a cook in the household of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Mexico City, and eventually becomes secretary to Leon Trotsky during his Mexican exile. After Trotsky's assassination in 1940, Shepherd returns to the United States, where he becomes a bestselling historical novelist — and where, in the Red Scare of the late 1940s, he is destroyed by exactly the forces he had spent his career trying to document in fiction.
Kingsolver's novel is structured as an archive: journals, newspaper clippings, letters, transcripts of testimony, a secretary's retrospective annotations. The "lacuna" is both the underwater cave Shepherd discovers as a boy (a passage that closes as the tide rises) and the gaps in the historical record — the things that don't make it into newspaper accounts, the versions of people that public narrative erases. The Rivera-Kahlo household is rendered with color and warmth; Trotsky's household is rendered with intellectual rigidity and fear. Both prepare Shepherd for what America will do to him.
What makes the novel unusual is its formal argument about storytelling itself. Kingsolver is interested in how public narrative — especially the mid-century American newspaper — constructs a version of a person that the actual person is powerless to contest. The juxtaposition of Shepherd's private journals and the newspaper coverage of his HUAC proceedings is the book's best formal trick: we see exactly how a life is simplified into an accusation.
The Lacuna is less purely accessible than The Poisonwood Bible and won the Orange Prize rather than Oprah's endorsement — it is a harder, cooler book. Readers who loved the family drama of Poisonwood may find this more cerebral and emotionally remote. But readers interested in the McCarthyite period, in how art gets weaponized by ideology, or in the relationship between private truth and public story will find this one of Kingsolver's most ambitious works.
The big ideas
- 1.
The archive structure — journals, newspaper clippings, legal transcripts — is not decorative. It makes the novel's argument about narrative power visible at the level of form.
- 2.
The 'lacuna' is simultaneously a physical space (the underwater cave), a narrative gap, and a metaphor for what public history omits. Kingsolver develops all three without forcing them to collapse into one.
- 3.
The Rivera-Kahlo sections are the novel's warmest. Kingsolver uses them to show what creative freedom looks like before the Red Scare systematically destroys that freedom in the American sections.
