rerun: Sock by Kim Adrian

Posted on January 27, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Friends, if I continue to have gaps in the week, do y’all like the rerun posts? Or should I just take some Mondays off?

Either way, as I buy myself a second set of electric socks for all my outdoor winter play!, please enjoy this reconsideration of a book I loved some years ago.

Sock! What a treat! I know I just posted some predictions for best books of the year, but we have a new contender. This was a wildly fun, engrossing little volume.

Sock is part of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series, which appeals to me for reasons I assume are obvious now, after this increasingly object-obsessive semester. When I found out about the series, I exercised restraint and purchased only three books: Sock, Hood, and Souvenir.

Kim Adrian’s task here was to write about the sock. What is a sock, what is its job in the world, where did it come from, what is its significance? You know, just the basics. It’s a remarkable ambition in the first place, for any object (others in the series include Burger, Shopping Mall, Eye Chart, Tree, Cigarette Lighter… as well as the less object-like Silence and Doctor). To quote one of the book’s blurbs:

The Object Lessons series achieves something very close to magic: the books take ordinary–even banal–objects and animate them with a rich history of invention, political struggle, science, and popular mythology. Filled with fascinating details and conveyed in sharp, accessible prose, the books make the everyday world come to life. Be warned: once you’ve read a few of these, you’ll start walking around your house, picking up random objects, and musing aloud: ‘I wonder what the story is behind this thing?’ (Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From and How We Got to Now.)

I couldn’t have said it better myself, so I didn’t.

So, the sock. Adrian’s table of contents offers an introduction and three sections: “Socks and evolution,” “Socks and desire,” “Socks and industry,” followed by a postscript: “Instructions for darning a sock.” (The back-of-book blurb begins, “Kim Adrian’s Sock is the darndest thing,” and that gave me FITS.) Adrian acknowledges the weirdness of her project. She can’t really account for her interest in socks, except that they are “intimate and essentially domestic,” and the domestic has always appealed to her. She usually writes about personal subjects, she tells us (“personal essays, memoir, that sort of thing”), and figured socks would fit in, because they are personal, in the sense that we wear them against our skin and they smell of us; but in fact this was a wildly wide-ranging research project. To paraphrase Johnson’s blurb, above, this book wanders through human anatomy and evolution, world history, politics, sex, and industry. If Adrian is fixated on domesticity, I am fascinated by trivia, such as (on page 9) the fact that we get our understanding of when humans first began wearing clothing from the study of lice. Textiles are perishable; but the evolution of specialized lice species, and their development into head lice, pubic lice, and body lice respectively, allows archaeologists to track textile development. This fact made me exclaim joyfully aloud, and I got to read the passage to a roomful of brewery employees. We were in a sensory class about the history of yeast species, so it’s all related, after all.

Adrian moves on to human anatomy and our unique position as vertically aligned bipedal creatures, its effect on our sexual practices and the way we walk, balance, the importance of the big toe, and much more. Skeletal structure has much to do with socks. Then there is the history, of course, of socks: from hay stuffed in a shoe-like cage, to woven foot wrappings, to fitted and knitted socks. She touches on the Industrial Revolution, delayed by Queen Elizabeth’s denial of a certain patent, which if granted, Adrian speculates, might have moved that Revolution up by some two centuries, and “what strange wormhole of alternate reality we might have tumbled down” in that case! Next we have sock and foot fetishes (the latter properly not a fetishism but a partialism), and sex; Jung and Freud, and the art of Egon Schiele, an Austrian Expressionist who left the feet off many human subjects but put socks on his trees. Finally, the sock industry takes us into concepts of fast fashion and slow fashion (a sort of throwback movement that depends on surpluses of both time and money). Here Adrian returns to an earlier concern with knitting socks, something she’s tried and not much succeeded at; she has great respect for those who do knit socks. Then the promised primer on darning.

All this in under 120 pages, and every moment of it was a delight to read, in Adrian’s mildly self-deprecating, often humorous, but absolutely serious-about-socks prose.

Some of my personal highlights on this wild ride included learning that Ned Ludd–he of the Luddite Rebellion–was a stocking maker, and started his movement by smashing two stocking frames in Nottingham. Did y’all know that? Also Adrian’s attention to words: ‘mundane’ (as in socks) comes from the French mondaine, or ‘of this world,’ and links us back to ‘pedestrian,’ as in Latin ped, as in foot. And ‘prosaic’ from ‘prose’ comes from Latin provorsus, which is pro– (forward) and vorsus (turned), as in oriented in forward-facing fashion, as in walking. Can’t make this stuff up, folks. Or, did you know that our feet possess even more nerve endings than our genitals?

I feel like I’ve written half as many words now as Adrian put into her whole book, this slim little marvel of trivia and attention to the overlooked. I am reminded of Mark Doty’s devout study of small details, his appreciation that “in still life the familiar is limned with an almost hallucinatory clarity, nothing glanced over or elided, nothing subordinate to the impression of the whole.” In other words, this book was a near-religious experience for me. I can’t wait to read more Object Lessons.

I can’t believe I’m doing it for the third time this year already, but here we are…

Rating: 10 stitches.

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A House for Miss Pauline by Diana McCaulay

Posted on January 24, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Near her 100th birthday, a rural Jamaican woman faces the good works and wrongdoings of her own life and her island’s history in this richly written novel of vivid characters and big themes.

Diana McCaulay’s sixth novel, A House for Miss Pauline, features an indomitable 99-year-old woman in rural Jamaica, trying to reconcile rights and wrongs near the end of a long life. Miss Pauline exhibits a brave honesty that endears her to readers as she wrestles with not only her own actions but centuries of wrongdoings on an island steeped in sugar and slavery. Kingston native McCaulay (Gone to Drift) evokes a rich setting through the food, climate, and other details, such as her characters’ Jamaican patwa, which brings them to vibrant life.

Miss Pauline is less than a month away from her 100th birthday when the stones of her home begin to shiver, shake, whisper, and howl to her. She has lived in the village of Mason Hall in Jamaica’s St. Mary parish all her life, having borne two children with her beloved (long-dead) partner, had many friends and lovers, and been an elder to the town. The village is built largely of stone salvaged from a plantation big house Miss Pauline once discovered and designated for reuse in building her own home and many other structures.

In this literal and symbolic rebuilding, she led her community in reclaiming what had been stolen: land, human lives, freedom. She is certain now that the stones are prompting her to reckon with her own life’s work: community building, but also the unresolved disappearance of a white man who came to Mason Hall decades ago to challenge Miss Pauline for the ownership of her land. A House for Miss Pauline is a deeply captivating story of one complicated, admirable life and the nuanced history of Jamaica. It grapples with how people are connected to place, and how that plays a role in the concept of land ownership and responsibility. “Does the cotton tree judge her for what she did? Surely it has seen worse? How to evaluate crimes, one against the other?”

Miss Pauline turns first to her granddaughter in New York, and then enlists a local teen, Lamont, for help with the mysteries of the Internet and a smartphone. Lamont, who’s alone in life, will play a role beyond research assistant for the near-centenarian, prompting consideration of what constitutes family. In her attempts to establish the future of her home and her land, Miss Pauline will also face surprises about her own history: “Maybe you have to go into the past to make the present right. Maybe the long ago is demanding something of the here and now.” Thoughtful, defiant, and just, the frightened but fierce Miss Pauline is uncowed in the face of youth and change; she’s a hero for readers of all backgrounds.

This review originally ran in the January 17, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 panganat.

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Margo’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe

Posted on January 20, 2025 by pagesofjulia

This book was an utter delight. I laughed and felt all the way through it and would follow Margo into her next chapters with enthusiasm.

Margo is a nineteen-year-old freshman at a junior college when we first meet her. She’s a bit directionless, studying English because she likes it, waitressing in her spare time. She’s been having an affair with her English professor, out of a sort of passive curiosity, not even because she particularly likes him (“this whole affair had seemed to be kind of his thing”), although she does like him praising her writing. When she finds out she’s pregnant, the professor (married with children) assumes she will have an abortion; so does her mother and her best friend from high school. Initially in contrarian reaction to those assumption, Margo refuses. She finds she wants her baby, and doesn’t care a bit that Mark (the professor, with whom she had sex just five times) doesn’t. After the birth of a son she names Bodhi, in short order, two of Margo’s three roommates move out, leaving her with a massive rent due, and she loses her job. Her mother refuses to babysit. She doesn’t know what to do. She leaves a voicemail for her father: formerly a pro wrestler, and since then a promoter/manager, married with five children, he’s been absent for much of Margo’s life, amiable and distantly loving but not much around (because work, and what Margo calls his real children). But in an unexpected turn, when she calls on him for help, Jinx shows up on Margo’s doorstep. Revealing that he is finally getting a divorce (something Margo’s mother wished and waited for for all these years–but now she’s recently engaged to a youth group leader…), Jinx moves in with Margo, helping to pay rent, caring for Bodhi like a pro, and quite by accident giving her an idea out of left field: Margo sets herself up an OnlyFans account. Things just get wackier from here.

This book is filled with characters. Jinx, the retired wrestler persona, is a study in contrasts: he fills his room with books, a ficus tree, and a sleeping bag, nothing else. He loves cleaning and cooking fancy meals. He is both inspired to violence and a calming, philosophical presence. Margo’s other remaining roommate, Suzie, is a LARP and cosplay enthusiast, and will turn out to be a great friend to Margo after a long stretch of cohabitating without getting to know each other. Everyone the reader meets could be a protagonist unto themselves.

But the reason Liz sent me to this book (with some hesitation) was the narrative voice, the set of points of view in which it’s written, and the literary references and styling. Margo was briefly an English student, remember? The novel is told in a really fun, tricky perspective: it moves between first and third person voices, but actually both are first person, because even when it’s in third person, Margo is there as the *writer* to say, I have to tell this in third person because I need the emotional distance, basically. So it’s a bit sneaky. Even better, there’s a scene from English class in which she makes the smart observation about a story they’ve read, in which the same tricky half-hidden first-posing-as-third-person voice is used. Meta, and clever, and probably not for every reader. I love it.

This is a story that surprises at every turn. It’s hilarious, it’s heartfelt, it’s deeply sweet, it can be upsetting; many of its details are sordid, but there remains a sense of stalwart pushing on. It’s a (perhaps) surprisingly wise story. Margo learns all kinds of big lessons: there are no heroes or villains; we’re all just muddling through; love may not conquer all but can do a lot. There’s no changing anyone; “they were like chess pieces: they moved how they moved. If you wanted to win, you couldn’t dwell on how you wished they’d move…” She grows. “I hadn’t expected infidelity to be about cuddling or drug addiction to be about eating Milky Ways.” Life throws what it throws, and these strong, wacky, loving characters carry on. It’s quite empowering, even if Margo’s predicament is not one we’d quite choose on purpose.

I loved every minute of this adventure. Thanks, Liz.

Rating: 8 tiny gossamer shreds of roast beef.

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The Café with No Name by Robert Seethaler, trans. by Katy Derbyshire

Posted on January 17, 2025 by pagesofjulia

A humble café in post-World War II Vienna serves as backdrop for all the large and small dramas of everyday life in this subtly scintillating novel.

The Café with No Name by Austrian writer Robert Seethaler (The Field; The Tobacconist) opens in 1966 Vienna. Robert Simon is 31 years old and about to embark upon the quiet dream of his lifetime. It’s his final day at the market where he’s worked for seven years, as he begins to clean out and shape up a long-empty café across the street. Simon is a solitary, steady, and kind man who was orphaned as a young child during the war and is now a reliable worker who keeps to himself. “For a while he worked as a glass clearer and brush boy in the Prater beer gardens, and perhaps it was there–as he roamed between the tables in search of empty glasses, chicken bones and cigarette stubs in the light of the coloured lanterns–that he first felt a nascent germ of yearning: to do something that would give his life a decisive affirmation. To one day stand behind the bar of his own establishment.” He realizes this modest ambition with the café on the edge of the bustling market, where Simon serves blue-collar workers like himself. He offers beer, wine, coffee, and raspberry soda; bread with drippings and gherkins; and a place of respite. He is soon joined by a single employee, a loner like himself. Mila, too, finds a home in the café with no name.

Seethaler’s tender novel follows Simon and his café for the 10 years that they operate, until a change in the building’s ownership pushes the small business out again. These years see Simon’s Vienna neighborhood rebuild from postwar austerity, its population and workforce swell and change, and cultural patterns begin to shift. The café is a microcosm of these evolutions.

The Café with No Name does not have a plot filled with action, conflict, and resolution; instead, it focuses on mundane details of life. “Simon couldn’t help smiling at the thought of all the lost souls who came together in his café every day.” An aging prizefighter, two older ladies who drink and chat in the afternoons, the cheese shop proprietor and her painter boyfriend, and Simon’s friend the butcher are among the regulars; they and others experience death and dismemberment, quiet violences, loss, and alcoholism, but also uplifting moments of humanity, friendship, and love. There are, remarkably, no villains in this novel, only people struggling against ordinary human challenges. While Seethaler’s characters face significant difficulties, the story never feels grim, but rather steadfast and even hopeful. Katy Derbyshire translates Seethaler’s prose from the German with calm delivery, charming descriptions, and understated humor. This lovely novel sweetly and simply emphasizes built family, resilience, and rebirth.

This review originally ran in the January 14, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 paintings.

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Highland Outdoors magazine

Posted on January 13, 2025 by pagesofjulia

When I looked, I was a bit surprised to see that I’ve not written before about this high-quality, locally-produced magazine. Highland Outdoors is regional in its focus as “West Virginia’s outdoor magazine,” but its contents will interest those further abroad; I’ve bought gift subscriptions for friends and family in Texas and Washington state who have appreciated it. And while you can buy subscriptions – and I do, to support such a great product – it’s available for free on a number of stands in local businesses, as well as on the website above. I appreciate that free availability and am glad to pay my way to help make that possible.

I love everything about this production. Large-format, glossy, sustainably printed, with well-written and -edited articles and really great photography (the publisher and editor-in-chief is a photographer), this is the first magazine that’s ever inspired me to read even all the ads: I appreciate knowing who the local businesses are who support the mag, and figure some of them might actually interest me, and I appreciate the design that goes into arranging those ads (they tend to be grouped by location, so that businesses in the same town cluster together, and often near an article that refers to that same town, etc.). It’s just a gorgeous product…

and I and my friends love the local/regional nature of the content. It feels really good to sink into a place and a people that you know well, or are trying to know better. It’s a joy to read about (or read words written by) people we know a little, and get to know them better that way. In the words of a friend of mine (also a subscriber), it’s a great insight and way to engage more deeply with our community. I’ve loved reading about strong women like Cassie Smith (league director of WVICL, our state’s NICA chapter) and Vicky Weeks (Leadville finisher and regular competitor of mine). HO covers stories about outdoor sports, conservation, flora and fauna, and the people who help to make this place great or keep it that way. I think my more distant friends and family are pleased to get a glimpse into my life (my place and why I love it) through this lens. I’m grateful we have such a quality rag around here. And I hope you love your home like I do mine.

Rating: 8 whirring wheels.

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The Garden by Nick Newman

Posted on January 10, 2025 by pagesofjulia

This eerie, thought-provoking novel combines sisterly love and end-of-the-world horrors in an unforgettable pairing.

Nick Newman’s The Garden is a shape-shifting novel, an enigmatic fable that twists slowly into a more sinister dystopian narrative with a surprising turn at the end. The questions it asks and the hard truths its protagonists turn away from will keep readers intrigued.

Evelyn and her younger sister, Lily, have lived in the garden all their lives, more or less. They remember little from before, although in the early years there were parties, their father holding court, their mother overseeing. Then the people went away, and the gates were locked, as were the doors to the bulk of the sprawling house. The sisters live now out of the kitchen, which “still [feels] too large,” and in the garden, where they keep bees and a few aging chickens and grow vegetables, herbs, and flowers. Their mother’s handwritten almanac directs their daily work, which is getting harder as their bodies grow older, but the garden provides everything they need and nothing is expected to change–until it does.

The sisters haltingly identify the creature that appears in their kitchen, stealing their honey, as a boy. Aside from its sheer novelty, the situation is frightening. The boy is unknown and therefore unsafe, a curiosity and a threat. “You know what boys turn into, don’t you, Sissie?” Lily speculates, “He’s probably poisonous.” But Evelyn considers, “Boys did become men, Lily was right about that, but what her sister actually had in mind, she did not know. A cocoon, perhaps. A chrysalis… Evelyn could not deny a perverse desire to learn firsthand, to feed and water the grub and see what it might grow into.” As they wrestle with this new challenge in their long-immutable garden–perhaps less an Eden than a prison–the sisters find themselves facing new choices and turning against each other in new ways.

Newman’s gifts lie in the quiet accumulation of his novel’s unsettled atmosphere, its changeable nature. The garden provides food, sustenance, and floral beauty; it is also constantly threatened by dust storms capable of burying the known world. Readers know both more and less than Evelyn and Lily do, and knowledge and its absence are increasingly terrifying, especially as the sisters begin to confront long-buried secrets about their own past. The possible and the inexorable collide in this parable of change, which probes the promises and terrors of personal choice and portrays various approaches to possibility. “The vagueness of their mother’s threats had made a blank space… and only now was Evelyn realizing that she and her sister saw that blankness quite differently. It excited Lily. It terrified Evelyn.” The dystopia it represents may be more real than readers originally understand.

This review originally ran in the January 7, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 marigolds.

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Hookers and Blow Save Christmas written & illus. by Munty C. Pepin

Posted on January 6, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Tom Transport is stuck in a snowdrift with all the presents for the town Christmas party and it’s up to Hookers and Blow to save the day… and the party!

This is a super fun kids’ book. Bear with me. My friend JJ loaned me this for humor’s sake – he got it as a gift when his kids (probably just one at that point) were little. You have already noted the heavy irreverence. It’s actually not only great laughs for the grown-ups, but a perfectly sweet story for kids young enough to miss the joke that is obvious to the bigger kids among us. There are the odd off-color moments throughout –

but also a wholesome story about a snowblower and a wrecker pulling the 18-wheeler into town in time to save the community’s holiday event. All’s well that ends well. I had a fabulous time with this one, reading it aloud (even alone!) for the rhyme and meter, and we all had a great time at a bike shop Christmas party together too. Fun for later: if you’re into that sort of thing, search Amazon for Pepin’s name and you’ll find plenty of similar titles. I can’t speak for the wholesomeness of any of those, yet.

Happy holidays and thanks for the silly times, JJ.

Rating: 7 gifts.

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2024: A Year in Review

Posted on January 3, 2025 by pagesofjulia

It’s time for the annual year-in-review, folks. (You can view past years here.) As ever, if these numbers are yawn-inducing, come back on Monday and we’ll review books again!

In 2024, I read an even 100 books (99 in 2023). This was an accident but does make working out those percentages easy!

Of those I read this year:

  • 84% were fiction (Last year, 75%).
  • 69% were written by female authors (70% last year). 25% were written by male ones, and the remaining handful were nonbinary or multiple authors.
  • Categorizing the fiction I read continues to be messy, with the largest chunk still being contemporary (24%), and double digits in fantasy, historical, LGBTQ, sci fi, and speculative. Sci fi, fantasy and spec have a great deal of overlap, of course, and is LGBTQ a genre or a content marker of another kind? I comfort myself by saying the categories need matter first and mostly to me… Larger single-digit groups included children’s/YA, mystery, and thriller. (Last year 23% were contemporary novels, 21% were fantasy/speculative/sci fi, 14% were children’s/YA and another 14% mystery, 11% were historical, and in the single digits were a smattering of others including horror, humor, literary fiction, short stories, thrillers psychological and otherwise, and romance. The remainder were small numbers of children’s/YA, fairy tale retellings and mythology, horror, mystery, thrillers, and short stories.) If the math gets funky for you here, know that I sometimes put one book in multiple categories!
  • I listened to no audiobooks this year! (Four last year).
  • This year, like last year!, 48% of my reading was for pleasure, and nine of those came recommended by Liz.
  • I received two gifts and checked out two library books, and purchased another 49%, leaving about half that were sent to me for assigned reviews. (These numbers are very close to last year’s.)
  • I reread a whopping seven books this year (last year, just one) – all of the Murderbot series!
  • I did 43% of this year’s reading via e-books (last year, 28%). (Ouch.)
  • 69% of the books I read this year were by white authors, but the Black authors numbered in the single digits. I really fell down on that one: non-white authors did okay at ~30, but I didn’t read enough Black authors by a long shot. (Last year the books I read were written by white authors at the rate of 72%. Another 15% were by Black authors, with 12% marked as ‘other.’)
  • 19% of the books I read were authored by people who publicly identify as queer, which I feel okay about (last year, 11%.)

As I’ve said before, there’s room for improvement in reading people who aren’t white, and specifically this year, Black authors. There’s no shortage of excellent books that qualify; it’s just that I’m fighting against some persistent trends in publishing and admittedly in the places I gravitate, because it’s easier to read people who seem like they’re more like me, even if that’s subconscious. It takes effort to diversify my reading – effort that’s rewarded with great reading! but effort nonetheless. It’s easier to fall into the lazy habit of reading what comes more easily across my desk. I’m going to keep working.

A new trend for this year that I didn’t love: no fewer than twelve books displeased me enough that I did not review them. That’s a large number. In years past I’ve done much better at either avoiding those, or putting them down early. I’ve checked in with some other readers (and book review editors!), and I hear that others are noticing a trend of dealing with more ‘duds’ (as I’ve decided to politely call them). There are a few theories, like a post-Covid publishing quality slump. I don’t have any empirical evidence, but it’s interesting that I’m not the only one.

So, goals for 2025? Read more Black authors. Keep looking out for diversity in various forms. Follow what I love. Avoid ‘bad’ books! (Meaning only that they are poor matches for this reader in particular. Life is too short.) And let’s all share what we love.

Happy New Year. Thanks for sticking around for all this rambling.

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best of 2024: year’s end

Posted on December 30, 2024 by pagesofjulia

My year-in-review post will be up on Friday, with reading stats. As ever, I want to first share the list of my favorite things I read this year. (You can see past years’ best-of lists at this tag.)

It’s been an interesting year. I had an unusual number of duds. But also, happily, some excellent reading as well!

I gave 3 books this year ratings of 10:

How about H. G. Parry with two perfect ratings!!

These books received ratings of 9:

Honorable mentions:

Whatever else happens, these are the kinds of books that can save the day – for me, at least. How was your reading year? What books save the day?

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rerun: The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver (audio)

Posted on December 27, 2024 by pagesofjulia

I know there have been a lot of these lately, friends; please bear with me, and know that I have a backlog of review still to come at the Shelf – I’m not slowly down, just having some funky timing. For whatever it might be worth, I do find it stimulating to revisit old standouts. Happy holidays! Year-in-review and best-of-the-year posts are coming!

Now, please enjoy this rave review from 2012.

Another long review – sorry – but one of the best books I’ve read this year, so consider sticking it out with me. Or, go to the very bottom for my two-sentence review. Many thanks.

Reviewing The Lacuna daunts me. How to capture the enormous world that is this book in a brief (readable) blog post? I have only read three other of her books* (liked The Bean Trees and Animal Dreams; not so much The Poisonwood Bible; all pre-blog, unfortunately) but from what I know, this is by far her best. (Her own website calls it her “most accomplished novel”). It is a Big Thing.

I shall take this one step at a time. Plot summary. A young boy named Harrison William Shepherd is born in 1916 to an American father, a bean-counter for the government in Washington, D.C., and a Mexican mother, Salomé. He spends his childhood mostly in Mexico, with a brief interlude at a military school in the US, and ends up working in his teens for Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, first as Diego’s plaster mixer, then as a cook and secretary and Frida’s companion. When Lev Trotsky arrives as a political exile from Soviet Russia, he acts as secretary and cook to him, too, following Trotsky when he splits from the Riveras; he is at Trotsky’s side when he is assassinated. Shepherd (who goes by various names depending on who’s talking) never considers himself exactly an ideological follower of the communist cause, but his sympathies are naturally aligned with those of his famous employers, for whom he has great respect.

Following the assassination, he begins a new life in Asheville, North Carolina, becoming a famous author of novels set in ancient Mexico; but the trauma of Lev Trotsky’s bloody demise, Shepherd’s sexual orientation, and his extremely shy and self-effacing demeanor keep him isolated from an American world that feels foreign. He closely follows international politics through the second World War, the United States’ sudden reversal of regard for Stalin, and the Dies Committee (which contacted Trotsky when Shepherd was with him) becoming the House Unamerican Activities Committee – which eventually begins to investigate Shepherd himself. This turn of events shocks our protagonist, who sees himself as an insignificant and apolitical player, but whose new Jewish-New-Yorker lawyer is alarmed at the skeletons he hides in his closet: to the point, an association with the late Trotsky and the still-active Kahlo and Rivera. The Asheville era in Shepherd’s life yields new and likeable characters in the lawyer, Artie Gold, and Shepherd’s secretary-companion, Appalachian native Violet Brown. (I think Kingsolver had fun with these *colorful* names, ha.) The FBI’s investigation of Shepherd threatens to tear down the precariously balanced, agorophobic life that he has so carefully constructed in Asheville; and here I’ll stop. I liked the ending, despite its considerable sadness.

Violet Brown is an important part of the story in terms of format. The story is told almost entirely in Shepherd’s own voice. As presented, he wrote the first chapter of his memoir and then quit; this chapter opens the book, and then we get Mrs. Brown as “archivist” explaining the reversion to Shepherd’s journals starting at age 14. The rest of the book is pulled from these (fictional) journals, with interjections from our archivist here and there, as well as a number of newspaper and magazine articles (Kingsolver notes which are real articles at the beginning of the book for your reference; my impression without checking each one is that most are real) and assorted samples of Shepherd’s correspondence. It is a very interesting format, raising all kinds of questions about voice and the progression of voice. I wondered, upon that first shift from an already-published 30-year-old author’s writing to a 14-year-old’s journal, whether Kingsolver didn’t trust her audience to start off that way? But I ended up feeling that this shifting voice felt very real; I enjoyed it. Violet’s role in Shepherd’s life was ambiguous quite far into the story, which kept me wondering, in a good way.

Another aspect of format I must mention is the audio version I listened to – narrated by Kingsolver herself, and to great effect. I loved her work here; every character had a voice, an accent, a lilt, a manner of speaking, and these were important in a story peopled by Mexicans with various backgrounds, a cross-bordered Mexican-American confused about where he might belong, an Appalachian-hills woman who worked hard for her education, and a New York Jew. Shepherd’s speech cadence as performed by his creator was remarkable and memorable; it increased my enjoyment of this story. The only drawback to the audio format is that I am always driving, or washing dishes, or in the gym, etc., when I’m listening, and therefore failed to mark down for you any number of remarkable lines I would have liked to share.

I was completely drawn into Shepherd and his world. I found Frida Kahlo compelling, which I think is faithful to her real life. The Mexico Kingsolver paints is so real, so filled with sensory stimulation, and in some ways familiar – the foods I eat, the places I’ve visited – which I think always gets a positive reader reaction. And the linguistic nuance of a boy (and man) who speaks both his languages with an accent, who brings Spanish structures into English, was so authentic, I just ate it up. (Like Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, one of my most favorite books ever.) And then the politics – the evocation of such a complex, rapidly changing, schizophrenic period in our history, through the Bolshevik Revolution, the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, Hoovervilles, WWII, Roosevelt’s death, HUAC… it was so very dense. I was reminded of Stephen King’s 11/22/63 (which is the more recent work), another novel set in real historical events that successfully evoked a vivid time and place; but The Lacuna built a bigger world, was more literary and flowery, and in my opinion was better (sorry, Stephen).

Part of this book’s fascination for me lay in its explanation of the hatred and fear of communism, Communism, and its various permutations and misunderstandings during an era before my birth. Kingsolver’s characters helped me work through some of my questions about this time and this perplexing, unreasonable fear; Shepherd shares my confusion, and the lawyer Artie Gold does a fair job of helping him think it through (as does Violet Brown, for that matter). Coming near on the heels of A Difficult Woman which I loved so much, and which raised so many questions for me, The Lacuna’s further exploration of the anticommunist era and my reading of it was very timely.

I’m sorry I’ve gone on so long; it’s only out of my enthusiasm for this dense and complex story that brought me so many emotions and questions. In a few words, The Lacuna is beautifully constructed and beautifully written, a story about artists and the power of art, about Frida Kahlo and Lev Trotsky and American anticommunism. I highly recommend it.

Rating: a rare 10 Mexican murals.

*I have since read Flight Behavior and gave it a 10 as well! I have not read Demon Copperhead and don’t believe I will, but yes, I’ve heard.

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