“Unsheltered” by Barbara Kingsolver. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2018. 465 pages, $29.99 (hardcover).

Barbara Kingsolver is best known for her novels, including “Flight Behavior,” “The Lacuna,” “The Poisonwood Bible,” “Animal Dreams” and “The Bean Tree,” but she also published a best-selling work of narrative nonfiction in “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life.” In 2000, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal, the nation’s highest recognition for service through the arts. Kingsolver grew up in rural Kentucky and, before she began her writing career, she studied and worked as a biologist. In her newest novel, “Unsheltered,” she has a chance to apply some biological knowledge and she does so in a very interesting way.

The book opens with the line: “The simplest thing would be to tear it down, the man said. The house is a shambles.” This is not what Willa wanted to hear from the contractor whom she had called in to see what could be done to fix up her very old house in Vineland, N.J. Willa feels “unsheltered” in many ways. Her house is literally falling apart on top of her family, with ceilings collapsing in several rooms. Willa had inherited the old house from her aunt and her family had recently moved there from Virginia because her husband, Iano, had just landed a one-year position teaching global politics within commuting distance near Philadelphia. Although Iano had received tenure at a college in Virginia, the institution had closed its doors around the same time that the magazine Willa worked for as an editor had gone broke.

In addition to this challenging scenario, Iano’s Greek immigrant father, Nick, who is in constant need of oxygen and frequent medical care, has come to live out his last days with them. In addition, their daughter Tig (Antigone), 26, brings in little income from waiting tables at a restaurant and son Zeke, whose girlfriend has just committed suicide, brings their newborn as an additional burden for his parents to care for. Although Zeke is hopeful about starting in the investment business, his student loan debt from attending Stanford and Harvard amounts to some $110,000. The reader can see very quickly that bringing this family to live in a collapsing house in an alien environment with few resources to pay for repairs, medical needs or even sufficient food or electricity is a recipe for disaster.

Kingsolver focuses on Willa’s family in the odd-numbered chapters and alternates these sections with even-numbered chapters on the family of another teacher, Thatcher Greenwood, who had occupied a house at the very same address almost 150 years earlier. Readers soon learn that Vineland had been established as a utopian community, founded by Charles K. Landis, which was alcohol-free and fundamentalist. Greenwood teaches science at the local school and meets resistance to teaching about evolution first from his principal and then also from Landis. Their house was also badly in need of repairs around 1870, but it had been built by Thatcher’s recently-deceased father-in-law and wife Rose, and her mother Aurelia was very protective of it. Rose’s younger sister Polly also lives with them.

Greenwood fears that he will lose his job and the family will not be able to survive. He meets his next-door neighbor, Mary Treat, a real-life character who was an early naturalist, conducted scientific research and even corresponded with famous scientists Charles Darwin and Asa Gray. Mary carefully studies carnivorous plants and “house building” by tarantulas and Thatcher admires her freedom, dedication and skills. He shares many mutual interests and beliefs with Mary and this was not as true for Thatcher and Rose.

The author holds the reader’s interest very effectively through her alternating chapters on two families facing many similar challenges in life. The 21st-century family has an interesting contrast between the environmentalist, feminist and liberal views of Tig, who had spent time living in Cuba and who wears dreadlocks and refuses to have a cellphone, and her grandfather Nick, who, despite dying from COPD, still smokes and laces his conversations with obscenities in both Greek and English. Although Nick himself is an immigrant, he rants against “evil foreigners” and anyone else he believes is trying to cut into the line for jobs and benefits ahead of him.

In spite of all of his hatred for “others,” however, Tig still indulges her Papu. When Willa drives Nick to Philadelphia for medical treatment, he demands to listen to talk radio. She resisted because she knew he wanted only “jocular, obscenely confident commentators who disparaged any kind of progressive thinking, egged on by callers who were angry about even the most basic modern social arrangements. Gay marriage aside, some of these people seemed incensed that their kids had to attend racially integrated schools. They were offended to distraction by the idea of a non-white man at the helm of their great nation. Probably they weren’t completely sold on female suffrage. These callers were clinging to a century-old vision of America, and Willa preferred to forget such people existed.”

Most of the modern family events clearly take place in 2016, when an offensive billionaire presidential candidate referred to only as the “Bullhorn” is running against the odds in the primaries, but holds Nick’s support. Willa is amazingly patient with Nick, but thinks to herself: “It couldn’t be easy to keep track of individual grudges against so many disparate objects, people, and doctrines. Surely it would be simpler to have some unifying theory of hatred that covered everything at once.”

In one of the 19th-century conversations between Thatcher and Mary Treat, Greenwood sees that Mary is furiously trying to drive away cats that have just killed some baby birds. In response to his quote from Tennyson about survival of the fittest, she has this observation on cats: “There is nothing of nature in these felines. They’re kept by cossetting human masters, pampered to perfect health and then turned loose on the neighborhood to terrorize poor wildlings who worked so hard to make a nest and brood their young. … And then they go home at night to lap up their milk and sleep in soft cushions. It isn’t a fair fight.”

The families from two very different and yet oddly also similar time periods are brought closer together when Willa begins research on Mary Treat in an effort to apply for some historic preservation grant to help pay for the desperately-needed repairs to her house. She first discovers that Mary Treat had lived in the house next to her address and then decides to still apply in hope that Greenwood’s connection to Treat may be sufficient to garner some funding. When Willa observes a tree full of a mass of birds, she realizes that these creatures annually fly across an ocean to the southern hemisphere, trusting in the unknown, while “believing in a map that never changed.” In some ways people are like birds, such as in needing to find shelter, but in others “humans altered everything on the face of their world,” while birds followed natural laws in trust. Thatcher and Mary conclude that most people nowadays want nothing new, but “hunger for any crumb of explanation that sustains their old philosophies.”

I believe that former readers of Kingsolver and indeed anyone who enjoys reading a novel that brings the past into the present and illuminates an understanding of both will be thrilled with “Unsheltered.” My only reservation concerns the final two chapters. While the previous 16 chapters are fairly balanced in length and parallel in considering the situations of each family, chapter 17 on the 21st-century family totals some 27 pages, while chapter 18 on the 19th-century family barely fills six pages. Although issues are resolved and readers are not left hanging, I felt the final chapter was unbalanced and could have been fleshed out in greater detail for better results. However, this is a minor concern and I fully recommend “Unsheltered” as a very satisfactory addition to the family of Kingsolver books. As a novel that engages readers in both past and present in very interesting ways, it will not disappoint.

– Reviewed by Richard Weigel, Western Kentucky University History Department.