After reading Unsheltered

Mary Treat, the real-life 19th-century naturalist and correspondent of Darwin, one of the improbable heroes of Kingsolver's fiction title Unsheltered [photo: public domain]

Some months ago I wrote about Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Unsheltered while in the middle of reading it. Now, finally, I have finished it, and here is a revision and update to my thoughts. To be honest my views are rather confused and contradictory, so I’ve labelled the thoughts into sections: what I liked, what I didn’t like, and what I noticed (but am neutral about). Spoiler alert, I give away details of the plot below. 

What I liked 

• Both the modern and the 19th-century tales are about the loss of shelter: Greenwood Thatcher and Willa both move out of their former home.
• The fearsomely intricate plotting: the entire book combines two separate stories, one chapter for each century.
• But the cleverness doesn’t end there. My partner very cleverly pointed out the book begins and ends with a little baby. The book opens with the mother’s suicide, leaving the baby alone and, well, unsheltered. The book ends with the same baby learning to stand up. The baby represents the new generation. The baby’s mother represents the old generation: materialistic, unconcerned with the environment, and committing suicide (no future for that kind of world view). The child, under the new management of Tig, the environmentalist, will grow up with a new vision, rather than remaining with her father, the financial trader (no future in that, either, at least not in this novel).
• The incredibly artful plotting, so that each chapter title is the final word or words of the preceding chapter.
• The capture, in all its horrific detail, of sibling rivalry (between Tig and Zeke) and how appalling it is
• The incredibly naturalistic micro-detail. By this, I mean that every sentence of the book is artfully composed and full of believable detail. For example (from chapter one):

He [Landis] should see his dying little burg now, with its main drag so deserted Willa felt safe taking out her phone to check the time as she and her legally blind dog casually jaywalked. 

Why mention “legally blind”? We have been told the dog was old, but not that it could barely see. And, of course, if the characters are jaywalking, there is clearly no traffic problem. The text is constantly artful, and draining.

What is Kingsolver’s world view? She is quite like Tolstoy: everything is grist to her mill, so she brings in her reading on whatever subject is of interest. It is indicated by the three books she recommends in her acknowledgements. The contents can be seen pretty clearly from the title of one of them: The Bridge at the End of the World: Capitalism, The Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability. That sounds like it echoes Tig's world-view. Another of the recommended books is The Book that Changed America, by Randall Fuller, about the impact of Darwinian evolution on contemporary America. That would be Thatcher Greenwood. It’s rare for a fictional work to have a kind of reading list at the end.

What I was neutral about

The sheer, overwhelming proliferation of detail. Whether is it Greek swearing, or the details of changing nappies, or how to treat an elderly man with dementia, or the details of how (or how not) to get tenure in academia. 

What I didn't like

• All that detail [Yes, I know this is the same point I just made in the section above]! It was impressive but overbearing. This was a novel I could only manage in small doses, otherwise I would have drowned in all that detail.
• The heavy-handed and trite plotting. The novelist includes as an essential part of the structure  for Willa and her daughter Tig to be arguing about the environment. They are too nice to argue that much! Truth is, adult children don’t typically get involved in stand-up slanging matches with their parents, but it provides for the novelist a way of expressing the debate about the environment. Rather clumsy plotting, I think.
• Likewise, the debate about Darwinianism versus evolutionism is clumsy (as I wrote in my last post). Mary Treat is an impossibly perfect character: a infinitely calm naturalist with infinite patience. Too good to be true.
• Similarly heavy-handed is the way Zeke, the financial trader, simply disappears when he hears his baby has been appropriated by Tig, his sister. In my reading of the world, financial traders like Zeke don’t disappear quietly. Yet in this novel the transfer of the baby seems to be the accepted and unquestioned order of things at the end.
• The heart-on-sleeve sincerity that is only possible in novels, which are not the real world.
• The transfer of real-world arguments to the fictional universe, which means that Kingsolver can take the parts she likes from her reading and create a good or bad ending as she chooses. Real life isn’t like that. At the micro-level, the characters are believable, but at the macro-level, the plot just doesn’t hang together.
• I drowned in the minutiae, the sheer proliferation of detail, that left me begging for mercy like a fighter on the ropes. There was so much detail, and the novel was so naturalistic, that I wondered: can any novelist hold so much detail in their head? At the same time, I realised that because of the detail, there could be no true closure at the end of the novel. Life would flow on, and I felt the book could have finished effectively at any point in the last hundred pages. And yet the final sentence does, improbably, offer a happy ending, unlikely as it may seem.

To be honest, I’m no closer to a balanced judgement than I was three months ago. Exasperating and enthralling in equal doses.