Open Serendipity

I recently finished reading Barbara Kingsolver’s latest novel, The Lacuna.  I love Kingsolver, so I had very high expectations, and I was not disappointed.  Besides being a great story that you want to finish, besides the threat of a bad ending and the ambiguously excellent ending, besides the thought provoking bits and pieces of history that make you wish you had the patience to study more history, or that doing so could be as interesting as a Kingsolver novel, besides all that, the structure of this novel is, once again, so very interesting!

It was many years ago that I read my first to Kingsolver novels, in the wrong order, thanks to my friend Krista who discovered (and shared with me) Pigs in Heaven first. A few months later, she called and profusely apologized because she discovered that it was a sequel to The Bean Trees! Oops.  Both are really wonderful novels, I do like Pigs better than Trees, though who knows if that is because I read them out of order or not!  But I cannot remember anything special about the structure of those novels.

The Poisonwood Bible, the darkest of Kingsolver’s novels so far, has a tried and true structure that I do enjoy: each section was narrated by a different daughter, with a short section by the mother in between the larger sections.

My favorite Kingsolver novel is Prodigal Summer: A Novel, for many reasons, including the structure. The structure of that novel is one of the most interesting I’ve ever had the pleasure to read. It is almost three novels braided together, set in the same time and place, but with minimal interaction and overlap between the characters of the three stories. Some of the characters know each other, there is a bit of interaction, but they each have their own stories.

The structure of The Lacuna is sort of letters, sort of diaries, but not in the usual simple straightforward series by one person. The existence and order of the pieces of the story are themselves a minor thread in the plot itself. A detail of that thread proves important in the end. It is not the most important part of the story, but it is delightful in the same way that the two intertwined plots of the present and the past stories are delightful in the childrens novel Holes, by Louis Sacher.

Filed under:
Books by marla