Rivera, Kahlo, Trotsky and him

FICTION: KATY HAYESreviews The LacunaBy Barbara Kingsolver Faber Faber, 507pp. £18.99

'MAY YOU LIVE in interesting times" is the barbed Chinese charm, and this novel certainly does. The Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver's first novel for 10 years, moves from revolutionary 1930s Mexico, and the unruly artistic household of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, to bourgeois segregationist postwar America and the dead hand of the McCarthy era, with its whispering campaigns and compliant press.

Harrison Shepherd, son of a Mexican mother and American father, works for Rivera, mixing plaster for his murals, then as a cook and finally as a secretary. When Leon Trotsky, fleeing the assassins of Stalin, comes to Mexico and the protection of Rivera, Shepherd moves to work with him for a time.

Shepherd is a quiet, reserved, homosexual man, who observes all and compulsively makes notes in his journals. He is seduced by the menage of Rivera, Kahlo and Trotsky.

These three major historical figures are all vividly evoked. Kahlo, who is presented as an Aztec queen, is imperious, hard-working and insolent as she imposes her will on the household, her broken body concealed by voluminous silken skirts. Yoked to the “great man”, she is dismissive of her own art but does the promotional tour to New York and Paris all the same.

The famous Rivera Kahlo House, a functionalist landmark of two large blocks, is wryly depicted, its architectural and political pomposity deflated by the cook's observation that "the architect planned for no driver or servants' quarters because he was a communist . . . A revolutionary house, free of class struggle, no servants' rooms because they didn't believe in laundry maids or cooks. Nobody does, really . . . Only in having clean clothes, clean floors, and enchiladas tapaías".

The outcome of this revolutionary architecture is that Shepherd sleeps in the garage with the flatulent driver while the car sleeps on the street. And the functionalismomasterpiece kitchen is too small to be truly functional.

Shepherd grows to love these revolutionaries, though he claims an apolitical outlook for himself.

The arrival of Trotsky ratchets up the tension, with a failed political assassination attempt and an affair between Trotsky and Kahlo, under the noses of both spouses. It is feared that Rivera’s cuckold’s bullet will reach Trotsky before the long arm of Stalin’s agents.

Trotsky is assassinated in 1940, and the ensuing upheaval sends Shepherd north to the US and the city of Asheville, North Carolina. Here he is deemed unfit for military service, because of his homosexuality, but is given a position with the Civilian Services, as an art curator.

He is charmed by the optimistic possibilities of the postwar US and starts to write novels, because he wants to make “art for the hopeful”. The novels are potboilers, set in pre-Spanish Mexico, among Aztecs and Mayans.

He is hugely successful, and his reclusive lifestyle – he suffers from agoraphobia, induced by his proximity to Trotsky’s assassination – makes him the object of media speculation. In particular, he is feted as an available bachelor.

Though his novels are commercial, they have strong underlying political themes. One is read as a condemnation of the United States’ use of the atomic bomb. When the House Un-American Activities Committee gets going in earnest, Shepherd becomes one of its victims.

The McCarthy era is a curious part of modern US history, a sort of national paranoid episode. In an attempt to deal with it as art, Arthur Miller gave us the metaphorical The Crucible, where the anticommunist purge became synonymous with a witch trial.

Kingsolver has set herself a fascinating task here: to investigate McCarthyism in the form of a realistic novel. This book is insightful and very entertaining, its fictional components often much less outrageous than the historical events incorporated in the narrative. May you live in interesting times indeed.

Katy Hayes is a writer. Her most recent novel is Lindbergh's Legacy