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).
She decided it would be “useful to go back to some other moment in history when people felt a similar absolute disorientation in the universe”. She’d considered writing about Darwin himself, before deciding “I write American novels”, no matter how far afield they roam. “Such a sweet man!” she says. “Thank God there was no internet. People hated him so much. Emily Dickinson hated him, for God’s sakes! She didn’t hate anybody.” It’s “hard to understand now how threatening it was”, she says of Darwin’s ideas, for human beings to be told that in fact they weren’t “put here to be in charge of the rest of the world”. Her hope in Unsheltered was to explore “paradigm shift”. “What do people do when it feels like they’re living through the end of the world as we know it? Because that’s what it seems like we’re doing right now, and almost nobody disagrees. And maybe people said that 10 years ago, but now they’re really saying ‘WTF?’”
Like those in 1871, the characters in 2016 are struggling to come to terms with the realisation that all their assumptions and expectations in life, including their basic understanding of both natural and economic laws, no longer apply. The beliefs that “ice would stay frozen and there would always be more fish in the sea”, that growth and consumption could and should go on for ever, that hard work would pay off and that each generation would have more than the last, have been swept away. Whether now or at the fall of the Roman empire, Kingsolver says: “At the end of an era, people keep grabbing harder on to the world that they know.” See what happens, as she puts it, “when you put a bunch of rats in a box.” And of course when their material shelter is under threat, people tend to seek the safety of familiar ideas. She is not surprised that “we either choose or allow men to lead us who formed their notion of what is good and how to solve problems half a century ago, in the 1950s and 60s. Look at any picture of who’s running this country. They’re all old men in suits.”
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
