The unsheltered, by Barbara Kingsolver

For Willa Knox’s family, there has been a perfect storm of misfortunes and losses.  The magazine she wrote for folded at the same time her tenured professor husband, Iano, lost his job – his university has also gone under.  Taking whatever job he can find nearby, they relocate to Vineland, New Jersey, and move into a century’s old brick home inherited from Willa’s late aunt.  Alarmingly, the house too is a “shambles” and literally falling down around them.  Willa and Iano have two grown children.  Bright and striving Zeke lived with his partner, Helene, a similarly inclined British woman.  After their child Aldus is born, Helene, who is more troubled than anyone realizes, commits suicide, leaving Aldus, soon nicknamed Dusty, in the care of his paternal parents while Zeke seeks his fortune in a start-up in New York.  He’s deeply in debt with student loans from his ivied education.  Daughter Antigone, called Tig, has also moved back home after several years in Cuba – a free-spirit with contempt for free-market, consumer-driven American life, she is the diametric opposite of her successful brother.  But that’s not all!  Nick, Iano’s difficult and foul-mouthed (in both English and Greek) father, is also living with them and is not “going gently into that good night” despite being obese, chair-bound, and dangerously diabetic.  Think they have it bad?  Well, there’s another family who inhabited this plot of land 140 years earlier and they had their problems too – including a falling down house.  The two families lives intertwine in alternating chapters, connected as well by the last word or words of one chapter becoming the first in the next.  The older story involves a fascinating real-life character, Mary Trent, who studied ferns and other plants in the nearby Pine Barrens area and corresponded with Charles Darwin and other scientific heavy-hitters of the time.  The fictional Thatcher Greenwood, a science teacher in the town’s school, owner of the falling-down house, and her neighbor, becomes involved with her life and that of the utopian town of Vineland, where Darwinism is clashing with religion.  The founder of this utopia has some strikingly undemocratic ideas.  This novel is engaging but not one of Kingsolver’s best.  Unfortunately, too much recent politics works its way into both storylines which I found intrusive and not that well-handled.  Frankly, I am reading novels to escape that…..  462 pp.