Book Review: Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver
Barbara Kingsolver’s latest novel, Unsheltered, is a worried book. It’s worried about climate change, worried about the American economy, about health care in the U.S. (or the lack of access to it), about the American middle class withering away. Kingsolver was worried when she published the book last year, and I would bet she’s even more worried now.
The novel tells two intertwined stories set in the real-world village of Vineland, New Jersey. The first takes place during the 19th century, not long after Vineland was founded as a would-be utopian community. The second is contemporary and told as the community goes to seed.
In the end, the stories meet up, but to give more details would be a spoiler. Let’s just say the 19th century story centres on a fictional schoolteacher named Thatcher Greenwood, newly-arrived in Vineland, and his relationship with Kingsolver’s evocation of a real-life scientist who lived there in the 1870s. Mary Treat was an early female naturalist neglected by historians, a valued correspondent of Charles Darwin and Asa Gray. She had four species named after her, including an ant and an amaryllis, which I find lovely.
In the novel, the Mary and Thatcher become friends, with Mary propping up the younger man as he fights isolation inside his proper Victorian marriage and intolerance in the religiously conservative community at large. Murder ensues. Scandal. And a happy exile.
The present-day narrative centres on a journalist named Willa Knox after she and her husband move their family into a Vineland house Willa has inherited. They’re not interested in local history, at least at the start, nor do they feel any particular fondness for the community. They move to Vineland because they have nowhere else to go.
Like many journalists, Willa hasn’t had a full-time job in years, and her freelance work is drying up. Her husband, Iano, is an academic who lost his tenured job when the small college he worked for went under, taking their housing along with it. Iano’s father lives with them, and he’s dying. Willa’s dog is dying. Their son Zeke’s partner commits suicide as the book opens, leaving him out of work with a newborn baby.
Written down so baldly, it sounds dire, but Unsheltered is one of Kingsolver’s more spritely books. Willa is jokey and wry, and the authorial decision to tell the present-day story through her eyes means it moves along at a good clip. I found myself almost able to accept the flood of bad luck experienced by Willa’s family, not least because I know people who’ve had their lives similarly pulled out from under them.
But only almost. The modern part of the book feels schematic, with the falling-apart family living in a falling-down house, the leaking roof and crumbling plaster forcing them into tighter and tighter quarters until most of them are sharing a mattress on the living room floor. It’s a bit too symbolic, and the family debates have a tendency to turn expository.
“’Dad’s right,’ Zeke said, “New technologies have a transformative impact on economic output, and eventually that will rebound. Supply and demand is a law, like physics. If you go too fast, your car overheats and you slow down.’”
And that’s just a quote I pulled when opening the book randomly.
Yet there’s another character in the present-day section that I’m still thinking about, partly because of the preoccupations I wrote about last week. Willa’s daughter Antigone, who’s called Tig, is a tough young woman in her mid-twenties who lives increasingly off the grid.
At first, Tig moves into the falling-down house with the rest of the family. But she soon hooks up with the Mexican-American mechanic named Jorge who lives next door. Together Tig and Jorge rebuild an abandoned shed, one room up and one down, furnishing it with cast-offs and trading for food. Meanwhile, they head toward adopting a baby, giving him a rattle made of gravel in a discarded pill bottle.
Hurricane Sandy has blown through New Jersey before the book opens, and Trump is about to arrive as president. It’s fair to say that Tig and her partner live post-apocalyptically, the way too many people are forced to live these days, although she and Jorge do it with their eyes wide open.
“’It’s going to be fire and rain, Mom,'” says Tig. “‘Storms we can’t deal with, so many people homeless. Not just homeless but placeless. Cities go underwater and then what? You can’t shelter in a place anymore when there isn’t a place.’
“Willa tucked her hands between her knees and declined to believe these things.
“’The Middle East and North Africa are almost out of water. Asia’s underwater. Syria is dystopian. Somalia, Bangladesh, dystopian. Everybody’s getting weather never happened before. Melting permafrost means we’ve got like, a minute to turn this mess around, or else it’s going to stop us.’”
Tig’s solution?
“’The thing is, Mom, the secret of happiness is low expectations,’” she says, then uses salvaged lumber to lay a floor in her two-room house.
I read Unsheltered while working on my obsessive house project, recycling cartloads of stuff while fixing up the rest, always keeping one eye on Marie Kondo’s mandated shedding and the other on the countervailing trend of Making Do. Reading it at night, I felt a little like Tig, who thinks about the future as much as the present. Or maybe she thinks of the future as already being present.
Part of my house project is rooted in my husband’s MS and the fact we aren’t sure if we’ll have to move. Part comes from the fact I can do the physical work easily now but know I won’t be able to hump furniture around forever. Another part comes from being sick of having to keep so much stuff clean and in order. I’m looking forward to doing other things. (Or sometimes doing nothing. Wouldn’t that be nice?) Then there’s the fact I want to be sure that if I’m hit by a bus tomorrow, I won’t leave too mess of a mess to my son. Future, future, all of it.
And maybe there’s something else. Maybe what I’m doing is unconsciously tied to the environmental anxiety that speaks through Tig.
Maybe it speaks through Marie Kondo, too. Her program of de-cluttering is billed as an aesthetic practice, but of course many people are purging for economic reasons. Being unable to afford big houses, they’re trying to cram their lives into smaller and smaller spaces.
And maybe, at a less conscious level, it also represents peoples’ anxious need to gain control their lives in a world that feels out of control.
Ditto for the Making Do folks who, unlike Kondo-ites, are clear about fixing things up because they’re broke, and admit just as openly to environmental panic. Climate change is here and it’s going to get worse. I don’t think I’m alone in wanting/needing/having to do something about it, and not being sure what.
I’ve been a member of Greenpeace forever, paying my dues and faithfully signing petitions even though I’m not sure they do any good. I’ve also been doing an eco-audit while cleaning out the house, researching models of yoghurt makers to replace the endless plastic tubs we put out for recycling, trying to find re-useable non-plastic produce bags that don’t fall apart in the wash. I’ve got a list. Dude, have I got a list.
And meanwhile I can’t help but suspect that I’m fiddling while Rome burns, or the Amazon does, like this writer in The Guardian who spent a month trying to live plastic-free. We’re worried, just as Unsheltered is worried about its shopping bag of troubles.
I like some of Kingsolver’s other books better than this one, but I find Unsheltered resonant. Maybe I would have preferred to see the book focus on Tig and Mary Treat, getting rid of some of the other characters along with the didacticism, although of course other readers will prefer different characters. Maybe I had a writerly feeling that another draft wouldn’t have hurt (and hurried back to the manuscript of my own new novel to do some rewriting).
Yet this is such a central issue that I’m glad Kingsolver has written about it. So many other novels revolve around privileged white angst. Okay, so this revolves around de-privileged white angst. But it’s actually about something and that’s, well, a treat.
You can order Unsheltered here.
Lesley Krueger’s latest novel is Mad Richard.