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Fiction

In Barbara Kingsolver’s New Book, a Family Teeters on the Brink

Credit...Sally Deng

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UNSHELTERED
By Barbara Kingsolver
480 pp. HarperCollins Publishers. $29.99.

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, Iano 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 Iano 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.

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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 21st- and 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. It 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.

Meg Wolitzer’s novels include “The Female Persuasion,” “The Interestings” and “The Wife.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 13 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: No Place Like Home. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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