The Lacuna

Harrison Shepherd, born to an American father and Mexican mother, grows up between countries and languages before landing, as a teenager, in the household of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, mixing plaster for Rivera's murals and absorbing Kahlo's unsparing wit at close range. Kingsolver builds the early chapters around Shepherd's job as a kind of privileged invisibility, present for everything, indispensable to no one's story but his own, that later becomes his defining skill: when Kahlo brings the exiled Leon Trotsky into the household, Shepherd becomes his secretary and, on the day of Trotsky's assassination in 1940, one of the few witnesses to the murder itself.

The novel's second half relocates Shepherd to North Carolina, where he reinvents himself as a bestselling novelist writing historical fiction about ancient Mexico, only to have his own history catch up with him: his old proximity to Trotsky and Rivera makes him a target during the McCarthy-era hearings, and Kingsolver stages the House Un-American Activities Committee's treatment of Shepherd's actual novels, read aloud, misquoted, and reinterpreted as coded communist propaganda, as a portrait of how thoroughly a public figure's own words can be seized and rewritten by people who never bothered to actually read them.

The novel's framing device, Shepherd's notebooks and letters, gathered and annotated after his death by his loyal stenographer Violet Brown, makes the archive itself a character: Violet's occasional interjections, correcting a date, defending Shepherd's memory against the press coverage that hounded him, turn The Lacuna into a novel explicitly about the unreliability and the necessity of the historical record, the lacuna of the title being both the underwater cave of Shepherd's Mexican childhood and every gap the record leaves for other people to fill in with their own agendas.

Kingsolver renders Trotsky not as a distant historical icon but as an anxious, aging man doing crossword puzzles and tending rabbits while awaiting an assassin he knows is coming, and Shepherd's closeness to that mundane domestic reality, rather than to Trotsky's political theory, is what the McCarthy hearings later prove incapable of understanding: guilt by association assumes ideological intimacy where the novel has shown the reader only shared meals and shared grief.