Unsheltered

I don't care what Dwight Garner says, I find Barbara Kingsolver's Unsheltered a delight. Meg Wolitzer gets it right, though,

Kingsolver has long written socially, politically and environmentally alert novels that engage with the wider world and its complications and vulnerabilities, all the while rendering the specific, smaller worlds of her characters humane and resonant. In “Unsheltered,” she has given us another densely packed and intricately imagined book. Variations on the word “shelter” appear in these pages repeatedly, as the novel considers what it means to be taken care of (or not), as well as what it means to be kept, or to willingly keep oneself, from the cold blast of the truth...

Kingsolver explores how anyone might possibly find a safe place in this world that we keep befouling through ignorance, greed or incompetence... Kingsolver’s dual narrative works beautifully here. By giving us a family and a world teetering on the brink in 2016, and conveying a different but connected type of 19th-century teetering, Kingsolver eventually creates a sense not so much that history repeats itself, but that as humans we’re inevitably connected through the possibility of collapse, whether it’s the collapse of our houses, our bodies, logic, the social order or earth itself.

I was not surprised to read in the Acknowledgements at the end that Kingsolver's guiding spirits in this novel happen to have included three "illuminating" books I've used in courses in the past: This Changes Everything, by Naomi Klein, The Bridge at the Edge of the World, by James Gustave Speth, and The Book That Changed America, by Randall Fuller. And, "George Eliot kept nineteenth-century voices in my ear."

And there's plenty of wry insight into our moment in history. "When men fear the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore the old order"... “Zeke embodied the contradiction of his generation: jaded about the fate of the world, idealistic about personal prospects”... "Everybody’s getting weather that never happened before. Melting permafrost means we’ve got like, a minute to turn this mess around, or else it’s going to stop us”... "Friends will probably count more than money, because wanting too much stuff is going to be toxic.”

Plus, this icing on the cake: an empathetic nod to we who toil in academia's public sector. “Teaching struck Willa as a saintly calling, especially given the pay. But even saints shouldn't be stuck with intro classes forever.”

I'm now motivated, at last, to discover My Antonia.