Novel look at lives of artistic legends

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver. Photo / Supplied

Successfully fictionalising legendary people isn't easy. Their lives are often extensively charted in memoirs and biographies. They've had films and documentaries made about them. Their existences, relationships and works have been the focus of prolonged academic study.

Certainly this is so with Mexico's most famous artists, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Feisty feminist, nationalist Kahlo has been the subject of an Oscar-nominated movie, the topic of innumerable books scouring her private letters and wild love life, not to mention her prolific body of work, and a cause celebre of the women's art movement. How does one invent a narrative for someone whose every impulse has been so lengthily evidenced?

In The Lacuna, American writer Barbara Kingsolver's first novel in nearly a decade, the answer is to build a story around biographical elements of Kahlo and Rivera's lives. One step removed from pure fiction, this weaving of life histories through the tapestry of a novel might seem, potentially, an odd and fracturing literary ploy. Not for an author of Kingsolver's stature and gifts, however. Her Kahlo and Rivera are beautiful renditions of storytelling, especially in their careful balancing of the certainties of history with the liberties of the historic novel.

Underpinning The Lacuna is its imagined narrator, Harrison Shepherd. An American-Mexican bisexual writer, he's man and symbol, an embodiment of multiple binary opposites: North and South America, First and Third World, literature and art, confident and recluse, diarist and creative writer, separatist and communist. This is complex layering of personality at its best.

Not only is Shepherd authentic in the most difficult way - coherently contradictory - but through his journal entries, commentaries, etc, he enables Kingsolver to make plausible the social, chronological and geographic landscapes he inhabits. Shepherd's boyhood musings from Washington's Potomac Academy between 1932-34, where his American father abandons him during term-time and holidays, combine stories of infatuation with moments when he bears witness to the failures of the Hoover presidency and the coming of the Great Depression.

Elsewhere, Shepherd conjures up the political and economic turbulence of 1920s-50s Mexico, the upheaval of World War II and the McCarthy investigations into Un-American Activities. The comparisons Kingsolver offers here - to our own recent economic travails, for instance - also reveal the strong authorial concern, apparent throughout all of her work, for social justice.

Rivera's philandering and mythical paintings; Kahlo's disfigurement, miscarriages, costumes and surreal art; their politics; their Bauhaus home: here is stuff already on record which Kingsolver revives through Harrison's eyes - first as Rivera's naive plaster-mixer, then as Kahlo's worldly chef. But it's the small things, the things Kingsolver invents, like Kahlo's broken English ("XARrizZON," she says, pronouncing Shepherd's Christian name) which make the couple less like legends and more like fascinating, real people.

The Lacuna
by Barbara Kingsolver (Faber & Faber $38.99)
Reviewed by Siobhan Harvey

* Siobhan Harvey is an Auckland writer.