The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

Published 2010 · 528 pages · 158,058 words · about 16 hours at an average pace · literary fiction, historical fiction, epistolary novel, political fiction

How hard is The Lacuna to read?

The Lacuna scores 69 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 68 out of 100
The text frequently integrates Spanish words and phrases (e.g., 'aullaros', 'hacienda', 'zocalo', 'pícaro', 'lacuna', 'cenote', 'rosca de reyes', 'sapo-rana', 'nalgas', 'brujo', 'pendejo', 'malinche', 'chingado'), often without immediate translation, requiring readers to infer meaning from context. It also includes specialized terms related to Mexican culture, cooking, and historical figures, placing it above '2666' but below the dense jargon of 'Moby-Dick'.
Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
While the narrative voice is often direct, reflecting a young boy's journal, sentences frequently extend with multiple clauses and descriptive phrases, particularly in later chapters. The text employs complex subordination and occasional long paragraphs, demanding sustained attention, though it generally avoids the extreme hypotaxis or thousand-word sentences found in 'The Golden Bowl' or 'Absalom, Absalom!'.
Abstraction: 65 out of 100
The narrative grounds itself in concrete events and sensory details, yet consistently weaves in philosophical and metaphorical reflections, particularly through the protagonist's observations and internal monologues. Concepts like identity, truth, history, and the nature of reality are explored through the boy's experiences with art, politics, and personal relationships, placing it on par with '2666' in probing deeper meanings within a grounded story.
Information density: 72 out of 100
The book is dense with historical context, political commentary, and cultural details, spanning the Mexican Revolution, the Bonus Army, and the lives of figures like Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and Leon Trotsky. The journal format compresses events and observations, requiring readers to process a high volume of concepts, characters, and shifting settings within a relatively short span, demanding more attention than 'Lolita' but less than 'War and Peace'.
Narrative indirection: 60 out of 100
The first-person journal format offers direct observation, yet the young narrator often records adult conversations and events without explicitly stating their full implications, requiring readers to infer underlying tensions and realities. The 'Archivist's Note' further layers this by revealing the narrator's later desire to conceal aspects of his life, adding a meta-narrative indirection to the presented text.
Symbolic density: 78 out of 100
The text is rich with recurring motifs and symbols that carry meaning beyond their literal presence. The 'lacuna' itself serves as a central, multi-layered symbol for missing history, hidden passages, and existential voids, while recurring imagery of fish, howlers, and locked books consistently reflects themes of identity, escape, and societal structures.
Ironic distance: 70 out of 100
Ironic distance frequently arises from the young narrator's naive perspective, which presents adult behaviors and societal hypocrisies without explicit judgment, allowing the reader to perceive inherent ironies. Salomé's self-deceptions and the political rhetoric surrounding figures like Trotsky are often subtly undercut by the boy's straightforward observations, creating a gap between appearance and reality. The archivist's note also adds a layer of meta-irony regarding the narrator's posthumous exposure.
Resolution withholding: 75 out of 100
The diary format inherently resists definitive closure, presenting life as an ongoing series of events and observations rather than a resolved plot. Many character arcs, such as Salomé's search for security or the boy's quest for belonging, remain open-ended, and the 'lacuna' itself symbolizes unresolved mysteries and missing pieces of history. The 'Archivist's Note' explicitly highlights the destruction of later journals, emphasizing the permanent incompleteness of the narrative record.
Structural complexity: 68 out of 100
The primary structure is a first-person diary with dated entries, which is generally linear. However, the inclusion of the 'Archivist's Note' as a framing device significantly complicates the structure by introducing a future perspective that comments on the past narrative, revealing missing information and the narrator's later intentions. This meta-narrative layer, combined with the episodic nature of the diary, adds a notable degree of formal experimentation.

How The Lacuna is regarded

The Lacuna holds a literary regard score of 55 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Prizes

Where The Lacuna sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (288 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, The Lacuna scores 72 out of 100. A second mythos, romance, pulls at it with a weight of 0.2. About the map of stories.

Mode: Low Mimetic
“I’m a typist. And a cook. Sometimes now I get to clean rabbit cages.”
Symbol: Formal
Historical persons are portrayed and quoted from the historical record, but their conversations with the character Harrison Shepherd are entirely invented.
Mythos: Tragic Pathos (Irony phase 4) (irony iv)
Fortunately this country has a cure for such troubled minds. It is known as the electric chair.
Genre: Confession + Novel + Anatomy
The common custom is to place a note such as this at a book’s beginning. Instead, I let his own Chapter One stand to the fore.

Where the story of The Lacuna takes place

  • Mexico and the United States, 1929-1950 (1929 to 1950), the main setting
  • Isla Pixol and Mexico City, 1929-1931 (1929 to 1931)
  • Potomac Academy, Washington D.C., 1932-1934 (Bonus Army) (1932 to 1934)
  • San Angel and Coyoacán, Mexico City, 1935-1940 (Rivera and Trotsky households) (1935 to 1940)
  • Asheville, North Carolina, 1940-1950 (author, loyalty investigation, HUAC hearing) (1940 to 1950)
  • Mérida and Chichén Itzá, Yucatán, Nov 1947 onward (1947 to 1948)
  • Isla Pixol, Mexico, June 1951 (final diving and disappearance)

5 things that are true of The Lacuna, with the passage for each

  1. The novel's first sentence opens with howler monkeys, a phrase that returns as the book's recurring image for the press.

    In the beginning were the howlers.

  2. Diego Rivera gives Shepherd the nickname 'Sweet Buns' after he mixes plaster like dough for pan dulce.

    “Hey, Sweet Buns, come over here! Let me have a look at the boy who’s mixing this good plaster.”

  3. After the May 1940 raid on Trotsky's house, police dug seventy-six bullets out of the walls.

    Seventy-six bullets.

  4. Trotsky's killer uses a small pickax with a shortened handle.

    On the floor lay a strange small pickax, with its handle cut short.

  5. A line from Shepherd's novel, quoted out of context, is reprinted by sixty-one newspapers and magazines within weeks.

    The clip service at the publisher’s counted sixty-one newspapers and magazines running the quote so far, and the monthlies are yet to come.

Scenes in The Lacuna that Frye would name

54 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Katabasis, untitled
At the end of the tunnel the cave opens up to light, a small saltwater pool in the jungle. The boy swims through the 'lacuna' tunnel into a lower world of bones and ruins, the book's founding descent.
Lyric, untitled
Praise the Vanguard, because it says your name. An embedded love poem to Van, a lyric overheard in the prose.
Sparagmos, untitled
The surgeons found that the blade had penetrated through Lev’s skull, seven centimeters into the brain itself. Trotsky's murder is the bodily rending at the center of the book.
Anagnorisis, untitled
There were the two crates, one inside the other, and the space between not stuffed with straw but paper, all the notebooks and typed pages taken from his room in Mexico after the murder. Shepherd discovers that Frida saved his manuscript, pivoting his life toward writing.
Sparagmos, untitled
Someone pushed into the near crowd with a bloody face, the meat of his cheek sliced back and bone shining. The cavalry sabering of the Bonus Army is a literal tearing-apart of a community.
Pathos, untitled
Salomé in a shattered sedan with her heart dislocated one last time. The pathos of the mother's pointless death, noted in the news as 'the female acquaintance.'

Books that share these scenes with The Lacuna

About the author

Barbara Kingsolver