Month: January 2010

If you have not already read it, hie thee to a library or the Amazon website and get hold of Barbara Kingsolver’s latest novel, The Lacuna. Wonderful Mexican characters (don’t know how she gets into their heads and styles of speech) and scenes.

But much more than that. She artfully advocates the causes of The People (to which our government pays lip service while serving the corporations and the wealthy, like most governments) by bringing to life Trotsky and family taking refuge in Mexico and his assassination by a Stalinist agent, the McCarthy anti-communist campaign and throughout the damnable role played by yellow journalism, the unfairness of war waged by the rich and powerful but suffered by the poor soldiers and their families,all cleverly conveyed by a writer who purports to be writing non-political Mexican historical novels. She also brings to life Diego Rivera and his artist wife and the naive hopes of the world communist movement, corrupted by Stalin and demonized by the Cold War and McCarthyism.

Kingsolver artfully speaks to our time while purporting to be writing history.

Tracy Kidder’s nonfiction account of Northampton, Mass., reads like a novel, speaking in the voices of a good Irish cop, an obsessive-compulsive businessman, a grant-supported single-mother Smith student on welfare, an incorrigible Hispanic drug-dealer and informant, a sometimes lenient judge, a budget-cutting socially responsible woman mayor and many minor characters.
He teaches us to look below the surface of life in a small town and to consider its history as part of its present.
We are let into the secrets, unorthodox behavior, temptations, shortcomings and struggles most familiar figures conceal.
He pictures many factions: blue collar, academics, old money, petty criminals, teenagers, wives, girlfriends, exotic dancers, professionals, abnormals, senior citizens, et al. as they cope with the shifting present scene emerging from the pervading history of their small town.
Most surprisingly, all of what reads like fiction is in fact a portrayal of real people.