The author of The Poisonwood Bible is back with an ambitious novel charting the US in breakdown. She talks about the environment, victim-blaming – and being a hillbilly
Visiting Barbara Kingsolver on her farm in Appalachia feels like entering some form of enchanted bower. As we drive through the nearby town of Abingdon, Virginia, she identifies some brightly painted wooden houses; the tavern built in 1779; the Barter theatre that’s been running since the great depression, when actors performed in exchange for food, trading “ham for Hamlet”. Then there’s her big, cosy farmhouse with its heavy wooden beams, Bartók and Satie sheet music on the piano (she went to college on a music scholarship and has played in various bands), and her border collie Hugo following her around as she quizzes me in unusual detail on how I like my coffee. “I’m southern,” she jokes. “I want to make you happy.” If all this sounds a little too idyllic, there’s nothing sugary about Kingsolver herself. Warm but brisk, she seems to have arranged this as a safe place from which to examine the many more alarming things outside it. Her new book, Unsheltered, a return to the more ambitious, grand scale of novels such as The Lacuna and The Poisonwood Bible (which she’s currently adapting for the screen), though lively and vividly peopled, is a novel of ideas, and bleak ones at that. It addresses a world coming apart at the seams. Willa Knox, laid off from her magazine job and trying to keep her family afloat, despite a series of disasters – a bereavement, crushing college debt and healthcare costs, vanishing investments – lives in Vineland, New Jersey, a former utopian community, in an old house that’s crumbling around her.
While attempting to keep the roof from caving in, she becomes interested in the people who lived in the same neighbourhood in the 1870s; they form the novel’s second strand. Thatcher Greenwood, a science teacher whose excitement about Darwin’s ideas puts him at risk of unemployment and who is newly and rather precariously married to the socially ambitious Rose, lives in the same building as Willa, with shoddy foundations above which “the whole house is at odds with itself”. Greenwood befriends the historical figure Mary Treat, a correspondent of Charles Darwin and Asa Gray, who spends her time on scientific experiments, keeping spiders in jars and letting carnivorous plants gnaw for hours at her fingers (Kingsolver showed me some of these plants in her own garden).
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