Bovary messes, Shepherd parlays his domestic skills into a job mixing plaster for Diego Rivera’s murals (“It’s like making dough for pan dulce”) and joins the Rivera household as cook and typist for Rivera, his artist wife, Frida Kahlo, and later for their guest, the exiled Communist leader Leon Trotsky. Produce the Cash” - and, after him, others.īarbara Kingsolver Credit. Shepherd’s other close companions are the volumes in the hacienda library and his notebook, which he regards as “a prisoner’s plan for escape.” In the short term, though, it’s Salomé who escapes Isla Pixol, dragging the boy with her, bolting for Mexico City in pursuit of an American she calls “Mr. On Isla Pixol, as Salomé sulks over her love life like a bobby-soxer, lonely Shepherd befriends the hacienda’s cook, who turns the boy into a sous-chef while innocently cluing the kid into his sexuality (which bobby-soxers will never unleash). “You had better write all this in your notebook,” Salomé tells Shepherd, “so when nothing is left of us but bones, someone will know where we went.”Ī year earlier, Salomé, a slang-slinging Mexican beauty, had ditched her drab American husband (Shepherd’s father) in Washington, D.C., and chased an oilman back to his Mexican estate. When we first meet him, he’s 12 years old, living at a hacienda on Isla Pixol with his self-dramatizing mother, Salomé, both of them petrified by the howling monkeys in the trees above, which they believe to be carnivorous demons. But were he to consign these notebooks to the scrapheap, how would their mysteries be known? Who dares plunge into the wreckage of a discarded history, not knowing the risks of retrieval?īarbara Kingsolver’s breathtaking new novel, “Lacuna,” follows this quiet, dreamy boy, Harrison William Shepherd, from 1929 to 1951.
He’ll acquire a notebook and fill it with stories and memories when it’s full, he’ll begin another and then another. When the tide rushes out, it will take the boy with it, “dragging a coward explorer back from the secret place, sucking him out through the tunnel and spitting him into the open sea.” He’ll paddle to shore and walk home, obsessed forever after by hidden passages that contain deeper meanings - meanings that only art may recapture.
He emerges, gasping, in a ghostly cenote, a sinkhole in the Mexican jungle fringed with broken coral, wedged with human bones: a place of sacrifice and buried remembrance. A skinny young boy holds his breath and dives into the mouth of an underwater cave - a lacuna - swimming toward pale blue light as his lungs scream for oxygen.
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