Unsheltered

By Barbara Kingsolver

Harper     2018

496 pages     Literary

Barbara Kingsolver is a beloved American author, most likely best known for The Poisonwood Bible, a condemning look at the culture of Christian missionaries. I read that book as well as Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, the story of the year Kingsolver’s family determined to live off what they grew on their farm. I also read and reviewed Flight Behavior, a fictional look at Monarch Butterflies.  Most, if not all, of Kingsolver’s books have themes of social justice in addition to well-drawn characters and appealing plot lines.

Such is the case with Unsheltered, a novel with two story lines alternating between two centuries (the 1870s and 2015-16). My Covid-19-addled brain had trouble sorting out which characters belonged in which century, and in which story line, but I soon caught on to the purpose and social intent of the book.

What binds both stories together are two crumbling houses in Vineland New Jersey, outside Philadelphia. In the 19^th century, Vineland was the scene of a Utopian community, begun by Charles Landis, who hoped that the village would evolve “into an epicenter for the country’s greatest thinkers, writers, spiritualists and entrepreneurs, as well as farmers and grape growers” (njmonthly.com).

Thatcher Greenwood and his wife moved into an old family home in Vineland in the 1870s. Thatcher is a teacher totally enamored with the work of Charles Darwin, but he is forbidden to teach those theories in his classroom. He befriends a naturalist, Mary Treat, (who, by the way, was a real-life naturalist) and discovers that she frequently corresponds with Darwin and other naturalists of the era. An unlikely friendship ensues, and Thatcher is given courage to defend his educational principles.

Then, in the 21^st century, Willa Knox, and her professor husband Iano Tavoularis, his father, Nick, and their family move into a similar crumbling family home in Vineland. Willa believes that this house may be the house that Thatcher Greenwood had lived in, and she believes that if she can prove this, the city might pay for its repair. In this way, the two stories intersect, some of it historically factual, and in other ways, fictional.

At the core, the book is about shelter and the need for shelter. Additionally, Kingsolver speculates about collapse—the collapse of houses, the collapse of the body, and the collapse of the social structure. Although only a minor part of the plot, the pending election of Donald Trump and the collapse of the political system is never far from Kingsolver’s mind, even as she explores the collapse of Charles Landis and the Vineland utopia.

Many of the characters are very well created. I was particularly drawn to Tig, Willa’s 20-something daughter, who comes to live with her family in the crumbling house and brings a sense of order to her family’s crumbling lives. One of her more poignant observations is: “All the rules have changed and its hard to watch people keep carrying on just the same, like it’s business as usual.” I also liked Kingsolver’s recreation of Mary Treat. She comes to life as an incredible woman going her own way, in contrast to Thatcher’s wife Rose, who is very conventional. Tig and Mary Treat would have been friends if they had lived next door to each other in the same era.

There is a lot going on in Unsheltered, and sometimes the themes get mixed up with Kingsolver’s own passionate sympathies, both political and natural. For example, Charles Landis shoots a reporter in the street for criticizing him. (Does that sound at all familiar?) I appreciated her bringing to my understanding a community I knew nothing about, and also for exposing me to Mary Treat. What a remarkable woman! I particularly like Kingsolver’s turn of phrase, and found myself underlining stray sentences and thoughts. For instance, Willa’s comment about setting up housekeeping in this broken-down house: “Nesting was ludicrous, given the doomed state of the nest.”

On the whole, Unsheltered is a successful venture. It is not a pleasant story, nor a joyous one. It showed me that there have always been times when people were under threat for choosing to bear witness to their beliefs; that there have always been times when society, like a house, can crumble; and that there are always people who believe in the enduring nature of truth and justice.