Barbara Kingsolver’s New Novel Moves Between the Distant Past and the Troubled Present

“If you want a piece of property to go downhill,” Madeleine Blais wrote in a memoir titled “To the New Owners” (2017), “just leave it in the care of a bunch of word people.”

Barbara Kingsolver’s plump new novel, “Unsheltered,” is about writers and academics, past and present, who can’t hammer a nail. They live in old New Jersey houses that are crumbling.

Life pinches them in other ways. This book’s central character, a laid-off journalist named Willa Knox, asks this question: “How could two hardworking people do everything right in life and arrive in their 50s essentially destitute?”

We meet Willa’s family, four generations living under one sagging roof in Vineland, New Jersey. Their story is threaded with that of an intellectually daring science teacher who lived on the same property with his extended family, in a different collapsing house, a century earlier.

“Unsheltered,” Kingsolver’s eighth novel and her first in six years, would seem to have a lot going for it. It’s got a ripe theme for Kingsolver, an unabashedly political writer, to pluck — that is, how poverty looms today for so many middle-class families, just around the corner, one misstep away.

This book also offers, at times, the easygoing pleasures of Kingsolver’s voice. When she’s on, reading her sentences is like walking on crunchy leaves; her writing can be acute and funny. “To please their beloveds some women faked orgasm,” Kingsolver writes. “Willa faked composure.”

Yet “Unsheltered” is dead on arrival. The historical sections are delivered in starchily ornate prose (“Yuletide garlands appeared to perspire in the gaslights”) that reeks of orange rinds, rose petals and cinnamon sticks. You may feel you’ve wandered into the gift shop at a Cracker Barrel.

In the present-day sections, every other conversation threatens to become an op-ed piece or a humanistic monologue out of lesser John Steinbeck or Arthur Miller.

In a typical commentary, Willa says (the ellipses are Kingsolver’s): “It just seems like … I don’t know. There’s less money in the world than there used to be. I don’t know how else to put it. Like something’s broken.”

Lines like these alternate with fact-heavy exposition. Willa’s son, Zeke, a Harvard Business School graduate, is shuffled onstage carrying conversational bricks like these: “Per capita GDP in the U.S. has been pretty stagnant, Dad. You know that, right? Income used to be tied to productivity of the economy but that hasn’t been true since 1978.”

There’s a lot of Barbara Ehrenreich, of the crusading journalist, in Kingsolver. She lives to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, a good sign in any writer. But a novel isn’t an essay. Kingsolver’s politics, in this case, sit on the chest of her fiction and asphyxiate it.

Among the topics “Unsheltered” picks up and carries around for a while: health care exchanges, global warming, fair-hiring laws, Park Service budget cuts, the history of investment activism, college admissions and international trade.

This novel reads as if its author has been sent here, like Spock aboard the Starship Social Progress, to affirm our principles. Kingsolver wants to feed us improving ideas, as if we were moral nestlings. In the best of her earlier novels, especially in “The Poisonwood Bible” (1998), she gave her characters more latitude. They felt less like mouthpieces.

At some point even the humor begins to fizzle. A conversation about political science, poli-sci, contains this line: “I always hated the sound of that. Polly Sigh. It sounds like mass hysteria in a sorority house.” It does?

A lot happens in “Unsheltered.” There’s a suicide, a murder, a public forum that resembles the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial and a lost pregnancy, just for starters. But the book has a tempered emotional vibe. Its pressure isobars are spaced far apart; there is little wind speed.

Willa and her husband, a handsome and gregarious academic who never quite made it, live with his disabled father, Nick, a Trump-loving talk radio nut. After Zeke’s wife commits suicide, Zeke’s baby son comes to live with them as well. (Zeke returns to his job in Boston.) Rounding out this unit is Antigone, or Tig, Willa’s freewheeling 26-year-old daughter, just back from many months in Cuba.

Kingsolver is at her best when writing about the interactions of these big personalities. She has a good feel for human stuff, for the messes we make and how we clean them up. An unexpected love story develops between Tig and Jorge, a mechanic and line cook who lives next door.

Willa hopes to find historic preservation money to rebuild their house. She stumbles upon the story of Thatcher Greenwood, the science teacher who lived on their land. More important, she discovers his friendship with his neighbor, an actual historical personage, 19th-century biologist Mary Treat, who corresponded with Charles Darwin.

We witness Mary’s observations of and experiments with tarantulas and Venus flytraps, and her travels in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens. A nascent love story develops between her and Thatcher, who is married to the wrong woman. (She’s too stuck-up to appreciate oysters, a sign of bad character and grounds enough for divorce, in this reader’s opinion.)

Mary and Thatcher are both admirers of Darwin. Thatcher must fight off, in public, accusations that in teaching his students Darwin’s ideas he is peddling indecency. Kingsolver also works in a 19th-century version of an alternative weekly newspaper, of a sort, to liven up discussion in Vineland. Its editor is murdered for his inquiring habits of mind.

These historical sections, overfilled with Kingsolver’s research, stop this novel almost entirely. It’s always a relief to get back to Willa, who is real, and harried, and mostly delightful.

When Willa begins to dream aloud about finding reasonable comfort for her extended family, her daughter cracks, as if she’s in a “Doonesbury” panel, “Uh-oh. Mom’s having a visitation from the Ghost of Capitalist Fantasies Past.”

—

Publication Notes:

‘Unsheltered’

By Barbara Kingsolver

464 pages. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $29.99.