Review by New York Times Review
when we fantasize about other people's houses, whether they're online or on TV shows or around the corner from where we live, we seem to imagine them as gleaming-surfaced oases of tranquillity. And even in our dreams, houses often offer more than we had thought was there: a corridor we hadn't known about, a hidden wing. But when we enter a walled space inside a novel, we often expect, and in fact go out of our way to seek, trouble. While the term "real estate porn" describes our ecstatic obsession with the ways in which a handful of lucky people get to live and the rest of us generally don't, there seems to be no obvious term to characterize the literature that limns the trouble that invariably takes place inside fictional houses, whether they are claustrophobic, haunted or simply falling apart. But we are drawn to these houses just the same, not by the dream of tranquillity, but by the durable, and far more interesting, pull of complexity, and even the possibility of impending catastrophe. From the very first line of "Unsheltered," Barbara Kingsolver lures us into such a house: "The simplest thing would be to tear it down," says the contractor offering his professional opinion to Willa Knox, who has inherited this unstable Vineland, N.J., brick house into which she and her husband, lano Tavoularis, have moved after losing their jobs. The magazine where she was an editor has closed, and so has the college where he taught, and they have relocated here from Virginia so lano can take a new teaching job nearby. But even the inheritance won't provide stability, and the couple find themselves vulnerable and strained in all ways. Not least of it is that they are taking care of Iano's father, Nick, a Greek immigrant who is free with his racist observations, in addition to being beset by medical issues requiring expensive treatment. After being given the runaround at the university health complex, Willa challenges the receptionist: "The best you can do is send him home to fill up his shoes with blood? I think what you're saying is, the man needs to die." Additionally, Willa and Iano's passionate, political daughter, Tig, has moved in. And their son, Zeke, after the suicide of his girlfriend, is now the overwhelmed single father of an infant son he can't manage, and so they take care of the baby too. The entire family is steeped in devastating, contemporary American calamity. Somewhere slightly off the page, a Big Bad Wolf is huffing and puffing and blowing these people's home right into the ground. Kingsolver has long written socially, politically and environmentally alert novels that engage with the wider world and its complications and vulnerabilities, all the while rendering the specific, smaller worlds of her characters humane and resonant. In "Unsheltered," she has given us another densely packed and intricately imagined book. Variations on the word "shelter" appear in these pages repeatedly, as the novel considers what it means to be taken care of (or not), as well as what it means to be kept, or to willingly keep oneself, from the cold blast of the truth. On its own, this economic-disaster narrative would be a sharp, if polemical, cautionary tale, an indictment of American life at an inflection point. (In the background lurk the 2016 presidential primaries.) But Kingsolver is a novelist with more elaborate plans, and in the second chapter she introduces a new set of characters who occupy the same acreage as Willa and her clan, but back in the 1870s, the decade after real-life Vineland was founded as a utopian community by Charles K. Landis. Thatcher Greenwood is a schoolteacher whose house is also decaying, but he has other pressing problems. Having become excited by the truth of the radical ideas of Charles Darwin, he will be in jeopardy if he discusses them with his students. Greenwood finds a kindred spirit in his neighbor, the real-life naturalist (and correspondent of Darwin) Mary Treat, who, when we first encounter her, is lying on the ground outside, where it's speculated that she is "counting ants. Or spiders!" Later, Mary shows Thatcher how she raises "tower-building spiders of the genus Tarantula." Thatcher notes, "A little while ago I was admiring the competent construction of your spiders' homes and lamenting my own, without any doubt of our kindred want for shelter." The novel alternates between the 21stand 19th-century stories, using the last words of one chapter as the title of the next one. Willa imagines that if her house can be determined to be of historical significance based on a previous owner, the town might pay for its repair. And so, through this question of occupancy, the stories brush up against each other. The link feels real, and yet as delicate as a spider-web strand, suggesting the unity that can be found in the shared predicament of lives lived on the same earth but not together. Kingsolver explores how anyone might possibly find a safe place in this world that we keep befouling through ignorance, greed or incompetence. The device of the dual narrative doesn't work in every book that attempts it. (One of the most moving examples of the dual narrative is found not in a novel but a play, Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia.") There is always a worry, when a writer constructs a novel on two tracks, that one will supersede the other and that readers will skim the less interesting section in order to get back to the "better" one. A dual narrative needs to be not only well choreographed, but also, more important, necessary. Kingsolver's dual narrative works beautifully here. By giving us a family and a world teetering on the brink in 2016, and conveying a different but connected type of 19th-century teetering, Kingsolver eventually creates a sense not so much that history repeats itself, but that as humans we're inevitably connected through the possibility of collapse, whether it's the collapse of our houses, our bodies, logic, the social order or earth itself. The stories occasionally twine together in surprising ways. In the present-day story Donald Trump (who goes unnamed) has made his boast about being able to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose voters, while back in the 19th century there is a real-life shooting of a newspaper editor in Vineland in broad daylight. Tonally, the book can be a bit loose-beamed. From time to time Kingsolver lingers on a secondary scene for an extra beat, and dialogue between family members can feel studied. But mostly, the accretion of moments generates the feeling of being inside a fully populated house of fiction, ft may be a house that sways sometimes under its own weight, though that swaying is in the service of looking deeply (and often wittily) at lives, and the world, over time. As they stand beside each other in this engaged and absorbing novel, the two narratives reflect each other, reminding us of the dependability and adaptiveness of our drive toward survival. In a sort of emotional coda, Kingsolver ends the book with Thatcher and Mary together in the Pine Barrens, Mary describing a cottage in Florida where she's going to live in the winter; there's an aquatic iris growing nearby that may be unclassified. She tells him he "would do well" to come join her. Maybe it's also a kind of instinct that leads us to be on the lookout for our perfect idea of shelter, no matter how hard the world shifts and shudders around us. Somewhere slightly off the page, a Big Bad Wolf is huffing and puffing and blowing these people's home right into the ground. meg wolitzer'S novels include "The Female Persuasion," "The Interestings" and "The Wife."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 21, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Rather than looking to a dystopian near-future to address environmental concerns, as so many fiction writers have, Kingsolver (Flight Behavior, 2012) knits them right into the familiar lives of her ensnaring characters. In this exceptionally involving and rewarding novel, Kingsolver considers how our ways of living are threatened by the changing climate and our ever-increasing pressure on the biosphere, conducting a subtle, many-stranded inquiry into the concept of shelter within two story lines in two time frames, both anchored in Vineland, New Jersey. In the present, magazine editor Willa Knox inherits a house. This should have been a lifesaver, given that her magazine has shut down; the college at which her political-scientist husband, Iano, finally earned tenure has closed; his severely ill and disabled father, Nick, is living with them; and their adult children need help. Tig (short for Antigone), an Occupy Wall Street alum, has reappeared without warning after a sojourn in Cuba. Zeke, whose Harvard degree has left him in overwhelming debt, is desperate for help with his newborn, motherless son. But the gift house is a hopelessly disintegrating wreck. With nearly no income, torturously inadequate and confounding health insurance, and bewilderment over how a hardworking middle-class family could find itself in a catastrophic economic crisis, Willa, smart and persistent, funny and loyal, visits the Vineland Historical Society with the long-shot hope that their crumbling house is of historical significance. Readers, meanwhile, meet Thatcher Greenwood, newly married and moved into a home in Vineland, a cultist, alcohol-free community recently built by Captain Charles Landis in the wake of the Civil War. There Thatcher, responsible for his pretty wife, her smart and unconventional younger sister, and their status-seeking mother, is appalled to find that their house has been so shoddily constructed it is in danger of collapse. Thatcher fears that his position as Vineland's high-school science teacher is equally precarious, given his employer's staunch opposition to Darwin's theory of natural selection, which Thatcher has every intention of teaching. And why is their neighbor, Mrs. Treat, lying on the ground? Kingsolver alternates between Willa's droll reflections on her ever-worsening predicament, and Thatcher's on his, subtly linking their equally compelling, alternating narratives with a repeated phrase or echoed thought, a lovely poetic device that gently punctuates the parallels between these two times of uncertainty. As Willa thinks about how the need to shelter her family never lifted its weight from her shoulders, she shudders in response to the alarming bombast of the brazenly unqualified Republican presidential candidate (who remains unnamed), whom Nick supports, leading to musings over how we find shelter under the rule of law and in pursuit of truth. As for Thatcher, he discovers an ally in Mary Treat (who, it turns out, was lying down in order to observe ants in her yard). She is a renowned naturalist, popular-science writer, and valued correspondent of Charles Darwin's with a house full of carnivorous plants and large glass jars in which spiders are building their homes. As Thatcher battles with the powers that be over their resistance to Darwin's findings, Kingsolver explores the ways we shelter within our beliefs, however erroneous, when we feel threatened by new knowledge and perspectives. Becoming unsheltered, Kingsolver ponders, is to be imperiled in some ways and liberated in others. There is much here to delight in and think about while reveling in Kingsolver's vital characters, quicksilver dialogue, intimate moments, dramatic showdowns, and lushly realized milieus. Her delectable portrait of the real-life Mary Treat (1830-1923) places Unsheltered on a growing list of outstanding novels about underappreciated women scientists, including Richard Bausch's Hello to the Cannibals (2002), Tracy Chevalier's Remarkable Creatures (2010), Elizabeth Gilbert's The Signature of All Things (2013), Amy Brill's The Movement of Stars (2013), Marie Benedict's The Other Einstein (2016), and Andromeda Romano-Lax's Behave (2016). Ultimately, in this enveloping, tender, witty, and awakening novel of love and trauma, family and survival, moral dilemmas and intellectual challenges, social failings and environmental disaster, Kingsolver insightfully and valiantly celebrates life's adaptability and resilience, which includes humankind's capacity for learning, courage, change, and progress.--Donna Seaman Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Kingsolver's meticulously observed, elegantly structured novel unites social commentary with gripping storytelling. Its two intertwined narratives are set in Vineland, a real New Jersey town built as a utopian community in the 1860s. In the first storyline, set in the present, the magazine Willa Knox edited and the college at which her husband, Iano Tavoularis, taught both fold at the same time. They find themselves responsible for Iano's ailing father and their single son's new baby. They hope the house they have inherited in Vineland will help rebuild their finances, but-riddled with structural problems too costly to repair-it slowly collapses around them. Destitute after decades of striving and stunned by the racist presidential candidate upending America's ideals, the couple feels bewildered by the future facing them. Researching the home's past in the hopes of finding grant-worthy historical significance, Willa becomes fascinated by science teacher Thatcher Greenwood and his neighbor, naturalist Mary Treat, one of whom may have lived on the property in the 1870s. In the second story line, which alternates with Willa's, Thatcher's home is unsound and irreparable, too. His deepening bond with Mary inspires him, but his support for radical ideas like those of Mary's correspondent Charles Darwin infuriates Vineland's repressive leadership, threatening Thatcher's job and marriage. Kingsolver (Flight Behavior) artfully interweaves fictional and historical figures (notably the remarkable Mary Treat) and gives each narrative its own mood and voice without compromising their underlying unity. Containing both a rich story and a provocative depiction of times that shake the shelter of familiar beliefs, this novel shows Kingsolver at the top of her game. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Multi-award-winning Kingsolver's eighth novel (after Flight Behavior) tells two stories in alternating chapters, both taking place on the same residential lot in Vineland, NJ, but roughly 150 years apart. In the 1870s, science teacher Thatcher struggles with meeting the expectations of his socially ambitious wife while running afoul of school and city morality for teaching Darwinism and develops a connection with his next-door neighbor, naturalist Mary Treat. In the present day, journalist Willa tries to hold her family together, four generations of which are living in a house that is literally falling down around them, as they struggle with medical bills, tragedy, and long-buried conflict. In the historical story (Thatcher and his family are fictional, but other characters and plot elements are based on real people and events), Kingsolver finds parallels to our current political climate without being heavy-handed, conveying the frustration and despair of members of the professional middle class, who "did all the right things" but feel they are losing ground. VERDICT Kingsolver fans will find everything they want and expect here: compelling characters, social awareness, and a connection to the natural world. [See Prepub Alert, 4/9/18.]-Christine -DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Alternating between two centuries, Kingsolver (Flight Behavior, 2012, etc.) examines the personal and social shocks that ensue when people's assumptions about the world and their place in it are challenged.The magazine Willa Knox worked for went broke, and so did the college where her husband, Iano, had tenure, destroying the market value of their Virginia home, which stood on college land. They should be grateful to have inherited a house in Vineland, New Jersey, just a half-hour commute from Iano's new, non-tenured one-year gig, except it's falling apart, and they have been abruptly saddled with son Zeke's infant after his girlfriend commits suicide. In the same town during Ulysses Grant's presidency, science teacher Thatcher Greenwood is also grappling with a house he can't afford to repair as well as a headmaster hostile to his wish to discuss Darwin's theory of evolution with his students and a young wife interested only in social climbing. While Willa strives to understand how her comfortable middle-class life could have vanished overnight, her 26-year-old daughter, Tig, matter-of-factly sees both her mother's disbelief and her Greek-immigrant grandfather Nick's racist diatribes and hearty approval of presidential candidate Donald Trump as symptoms of a dying culture of entitlement and unbridled consumption. Lest this all sound schematic, Kingsolver has enfolded her political themes in two dramas of family conflict with full-bodied characters, including Mary Treat, a real-life 19th-century biologist enlisted here as the fictional friend and intellectual support of beleaguered Thatcher. Sexy, mildly feckless Iano and Thatcher's feisty sister-in-law, Polly, are particularly well-drawn subsidiary figures, and Willa's doubts and confusion make her the appealing center of the 21st-century story. The paired conclusions, although hardly cheerful, see hope in the indomitable human instinct for survival. Nonetheless, the words that haunt are Tig's judgment on blinkered America: "All the rules have changed and it's hard to watch people keep carrying on just the same, like it's business as usual."As always, Kingsolver gives readers plenty to think about. Her warm humanism coupled with an unabashed point of view make her a fine 21st-century exponent of the honorable tradition of politically engaged fiction. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
