Kingsolver told the Guardian that the novel asks the question, “What do people do when it feels like they’re living through the end of the world as we know it?”Ĭritics largely agree that it’s “the first American novel to treat the 2016 election at length” (Trump is referred to only as “the Bullhorn”), but they are firmly divided over whether it’s any good. Unsheltered is the story of a freelance writer and her laid-off professor husband, relocated into a decaying New Jersey home that is then swarmed by their dependent adult children, desperate to find firm financial footing, and startled by a nation that seems to be crumbling around them. With her latest, Unsheltered, Kingsolver has traded in moralistic enviro-catastrophe novels that focus on the decimated monarch butterfly and the blighted American chestnut tree for a moralistic financial-catastrophe novel that focus on the destruction of the white, American middle-class way of life.
She represented a particular brand of woke, middle-aged white lady, serving up the novelistic equivalent of low-cal comfort food: I can’t believe it’s not Franzen!
As Dickens showed us, morally charged novels can endure for generations. And this was before she went full-on environmental crusader in books like Prodigal Summer and Flight Behavior.įor a long time, Kingsolver was accepted critically as a social realist, come to lure in readers with “fiction rich in empathy, wit and science” and convert them one by one. He found her work so reverential of liberal sentiment, so much in awe of the plights of the disenfranchised, that it “place the supremely empathetic author in a protected niche, far beyond the reader’s capacity to criticize.” In other words, Kingsolver just cares so, so deeply for the world that you’d have to be a monster, or at least a little gauche, to rip her for shoddy prose or flat characters. In a long, mildly unhinged 1999 essay on Barbara Kingsolver’s career-cementing novel, The Poisonwood Bible, critic Lee Siegel canonized the author as “the most successful practitioner of a style in contemporary fiction that might be called Nice Writing.” It wasn’t a compliment.
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