Kingsolver's fictional doings in a real Vineland, NJ

One piece of apocryphal advice to aspiring novelists: Chase your main character up a tree and throw rocks at her. The idea is that your reader will want to know how the character manages to get down—or not.

In Chapter 1 of Barbara Kingsolver's new novel Unsheltered set during the 2016 presidential campaign, Willa Knox learns that her family's recently-inherited, 100-year-old brick house is literally falling down around their ears. Also, the magazine at which she had been an editor has folded, the college at which her husband had tenure has gone out of business and he has become a lowly adjunct, her dying and raging conservative father-in-law lives with them, as does her free-spirited, tree-hugging daughter, recently returned from Cuba. Her son, a recent college graduate with over $100,000 in outstanding student loans, calls from Boston where he is living with lovely woman on the fast track to a lucrative law career despite just given birth. The woman has killed herself.

Chapter 2 is set in the 1870s. Thatcher Greenwood has been hired as the town's high school science teacher but has been forbidden to mention Darwin, evolution, or natural selection. His neighbor, Mary Treat, is an amateur botanist and entomologist who is serious enough to carry on a lively correspondence with Charles Darwin himself and his leading American advocates. Thatcher, a man of science, becomes friends with Mary, a woman of science advanced for her time (and an actual person who actually lived). The rest of the book's chapters alternate in times and point of view.

What connects them is that Willa and Thatcher live in essentially the same house in the same—actual—New Jersey town, Vineland. In 1861 Charles Landis, a 28-year old Philadelphia attorney, bought 20,000 scrubland acres in southern New Jersey, carved streets out of the wilderness, and established his own utopian community. Landis, another actual person who appears in Kingsolver's novel, required land buyers to build a home, live on the land, and plant fruit trees within the first year of purchase. So we have a novel that mixes historical reality and fiction, and by implication shows how far we've come—or not. One of the many things I find impressive about Unsheltered is that Kingsolver is able to weave the 19th Century and the 21st Century stories together without showing the seams.

One way she does this is by making the 19th Century chapters sound as if they were written in the 19th Century. Here is an example picked almost at random:

"Selma gave a prompter's curtsey. A pale, fuzzy little mullein of a girl, nearly as young as Polly, he guessed, but more accustomed to work. 'Your mistress has such such praises of the Pine Barrens,' he said, 'I'm impatient to see them. I hope I can join you soon as an assistant to the assistant. I am very good at carrying things and getting deplorably muddy.' Selma made a squashed little grin. and glanced at Mrs. Treat. . . ."

And here is a sample of a current-day situation:

"Mother and daughter curled together in the recliner they all called the Big-Ass Chair, constructed for people of that particular make. It was an old thing, brown corduroy, beyond huge. Tig could lie in it sideways. Willa hadn't seen a piece of furniture like it before or known such things existed, but she'd seen the asses of course, so it stood to reason. The recliner had belonged to one of Sondra's clients, now in hospice, and the family wanted the furniture gone . . . ."

Another thing I admire about the novel is Kingsolver's ability to dramatize what are essentially abstract arguments about evolution, economics, social order, and more. I suspect some readers are going to be uncomfortable by some of the arguments some of the characters make. Here's Willa's daughter giving her what-for: "People can change their minds about little things, but on the big ones they'd rather die first. A used-up planet scares the piss out of them, after they spent their whole lives thinking the cupboard would never go bare. No offense, Mom, but you're kind of not that different from Papu [grandfather]. You want a nice house that's all your own, you want your kids to have more than you did."

It's no spoiler to say that by the end of Unsheltered Willa and Thatcher have been able to climb down from the trees into which Kingsolver has chased them. A rich and rewarding novel.