Barbara Kingsolver, Unsheltered

- This novel is well written but it goes on and on for 460 pages. It connects two historical timeframes (contemporary and the 1870s) by the house both parties lived in which is now falling down. 

- There’s something quite tiresome about this book. It’s just too relentless in the way it pushes its themes and dissects its characters. 

- It's a story of marriage, love and family as well as social change and politics.

- Both time periods suffer the intrusion of the future. Some people can handle it, are even enthusiastic embracers of it, some can’t - the conservative, unimaginative reactionaries. The social/political disruptions are the same. Symbolically the ceilings are falling down. Ceilings of authority, of habit, of comfort, of ignorance, of dependence. Ceilings that truth and reason blast away. 

- The historical story, based on actual people and events, is far more interesting and engaging. In the modern story the conversations between the husband and wife, Iano and Willa, are too often twee, lovey-dovey, endless and tedious. Kingsolver does not so much write, as indulge in writing. Her prose has a journalistic swagger that I found irritating. Clearly she is thrilled by her own gift, and she can’t let up. 

- The constant, unrelenting political arguments between their two offspring, Tig the commo greenie and Zeke the investment banker (yes, the names, I know) are frequently annoying and rarely enjoyable. 

- On the other hand the mother-daughter discussions are searingly honest and delightful.

- A few idiosyncrasies: for some unfathomable reason Kingsolver refuses to name the presidential candidate as Trump rather than ‘this billionaire running for president’; the chapter headings are the final words of the previous chapter, despite the new chapter being the other time period. There's no meaning to that. It’s a link but a tricksy and artificial one.

- So, all in all, four out of five stars.