The young writer is an acute observer whose watchfulness derives partly from his itinerant upbringing – as a 'double person made of two different boxes' – and his discreet sexuality. The novel is at its best in the oblique revelation of this man, with his lacunae of privacy and passion. ' – words that the novelist cannot truthfully deny are his own.Īccording to Violet, Shepherd was 'averse to making himself known. Shepherd's fate seems sealed by the view of a character in one of his novels that 'Our leader is an empty sack. Back in the US, as the cold war hots up, these associations draw the scrutiny of the House Un-American Activities Committee. As a naive and humble typist he plays a bit part in the rift between Trotsky and Rivera, and in Trotsky's murder. Present as Frida Kahlo despairs of Rivera's infidelities and as Lev Trotsky seeks refuge with the revolutionary artist from Stalin's assassins, Shepherd becomes Kahlo's sometime spy and Trotsky's cook and secretary. As a youth in Mexico City, he sees a tiny woman of regal bearing, her hair 'braided in a heavy crown', buying parrots in the street, and becomes a plaster-mixer and cook to her husband, Diego Rivera. Kingsolver meticulously inserts the fictional Shepherd into pivotal moments of recorded history, using both fictional and actual newspaper reports. Locked for 50 years in a bank vault until all parties are dead, these fragments were saved by the novelist's stenographer, Violet Brown, from his despairing wish that they be burned. But the story comes to us in the elusive form of diaries and memoirs, letters and press cuttings. Shepherd's story opens engagingly with his boyhood in Isla Pixol, an island south of Veracruz, in a Mexico scented with 'jasmine, dog piss, cilantro, lime'.

Born in Virginia of an American 'bean counter' and a Mexican flapper, he is raised in both countries, eventually becoming the celebrated author of American potboilers about the Aztecs. The life in question is that of Harrison William Shepherd, variously dubbed Will, Harry and Insólito.

It probes, with only partial success, the source of the vexed historical relationship between art and politics in the United States, as well as the gap between a life lived and a life reported. Yet in crossing and recrossing the US-Mexican border, as novelists such as Carlos Fuentes have done before her, this novel reveals a singular ambition. It moves from the muralists and surrealists of the 1930s in the aftermath of the Mexican revolution to the McCarthyite witch-hunt of artists in the late 40s and 50s.

B arbara Kingsolver's first novel in nine years takes a huge risk in venturing into copiously charted territory.

Kingsolver the lacuna