Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel begins in the year 1929, on a tropical island off the coast of Mexico. There, an American boy swims through an underwater cave to find himself in a secret pool in the jungle. There’s a ruined temple there, and in the pool lie the bones of human sacrifice. The underwater passage, he’s told, is called a “lacuna”: “an opening, like a mouth, that swallows things.… It goes into the belly of the world.” It’s a site of death, but also of buried treasure and escape. It is a hole in history.

History, and especially the gaps in the historical record, is the central theme of “The Lacuna.” Like other successful novels in recent years, this brilliantly constructed narrative includes both fictional characters and real people, in this case the colorful Mexican painters Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo and their controversial guest, the exiled Communist leader Leon Trotsky.

There to observe them is the American boy, Harrison Shepherd. The shy, bookish son of an American father and a gold-digging Mexican mother, he discovers, as a teenager in Mexico City, Diego Rivera’s murals depicting the history of Mexico. He becomes so fascinated by Rivera and everything he represents—national identity, socialist politics, the power of art—that he takes a job in the artist’s household as a cook. When Trotsky comes, at Rivera’s invitation, to seek asylum in Mexico, Shepherd goes to work for him as a typist.

The story is told in several different voices, pieced together from letters, newspaper articles, the recollections of Shepherd’s own loyal secretary, and especially Shepherd’s diaries. Shepherd hopes that the lies and errors of the public record—the Mexican press claim Rivera eats human flesh, while Trotsky is cast by both the Americans and the Russians as a Communist villain—can be countered, by his private account. He writes “so when nothing is left of us but bones, someone will know where we went.”

Shepherd has a lacuna in his own history as well: he is gay, and keeps his desires painfully hidden. Kahlo sympathizes with his need for secrecy. Lifting her long skirt to reveal her withered, polio-damaged leg, she tells him, “The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don’t know.” Later he himself adds, “The most important part of any story is the missing piece.”

Frida urges Shepherd to “crack open the mute culture” and write a “true history of Mexico.” After Trotsky’s murder in 1940, he does, moving to America and penning two best-selling historical novels about the Aztecs and the Spanish Conquest. His secretary, Violet, warns him to watch out: Americans “don’t like to see ourselves joined hard to the past. We’d as soon take the scissors and cut every ribbon of that.” Eventually, when Shepherd is subjected to investigation for Communist activity, he too becomes a human sacrifice, his career and life offered up to Americans’ sense of security.
Kingsolver plays masterfully with the recurring themes of unknown truths, modernity versus tradition, dual nationality, the liberating potential of artistic expression. She also comments sharply on current events, as when she has Trotsky remark that people “want to believe in heroes…And villains. Especially when very frightened. It’s less taxing than the truth.”

While “The Lacuna” is thematically rich, it’s at times narratively flat. Like many novelists diving into the historical record, Kingsolver comes back loaded down with too much detail. (“The Lacuna” strongly resembles Michael Chabon’s “Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” in its time period, political concerns, naïve, gay central character, and excessive length.) Besides, the lonely, improbably innocent Shepherd is too much of a lacuna himself to carry the book emotionally. To turn upsetting, enraging real events into thoughtful, skillfully constructed fiction, Kingsolver has deliberately taken a step back from her material. My feeling is that she’s stepped back a little too far.

Trouw, July 24, 2010. The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver (New York: Harper, 2009).