“Today’s problems can’t be solved by today’s people.”

And it’s Mrs Treat Willa hopes will save her house from ruin.

Thankfully, Thatcher finds friendship in the strange, wildly intelligent and delightful Mrs Treat. In Vineland, Religion and Science are in direct conflict and Darwinism is the sticking point. Back in the 1800s, High School science teacher Thatcher is struggling to fit in. The family’s life is full of misfortune, a stream of dead relatives, failed attempts at tenure and now their last hope is a house left to them by Willa’s aunt and it’s literally falling apart around them. The Knox-Tavoularis family has recently arrived in Vineland, New Jersey and matriarch, Willa, has just received the news that their house is a shambles, and shambles that may not survive the year. She has a good feel for human stuff, for the messes we make and how we clean them up.“The simplest thing would be to tear it down,” the man said. Kingsolver wants to feed us improving ideas, as if we were moral nestlings. This novel reads as if its author has been sent here, like Spock aboard the Starship Social Progress, to affirm our principles. Kingsolver’s politics, in this case, sit on the chest of her fiction and asphyxiate it. In the present-day sections, every other conversation threatens to become an op-ed piece or a humanistic monologue out of lesser John Steinbeck or Arthur Miller. The historical sections are delivered in starchily ornate prose. When she’s on, reading her sentences is like walking on crunchy leaves her writing can be acute and funny. This book also offers, at times, the easygoing pleasures of Kingsolver’s voice. It’s got a ripe theme for Kingsolver, an unabashedly political writer, to pluck - that is, how poverty looms today for so many middle-class families. But mostly, the accretion of moments generates the feeling of being inside a fully populated house of fiction. From time to time Kingsolver lingers on a secondary scene for an extra beat, and dialogue between family members can feel studied. Tonally, the book can be a bit loose-beamed. The stories occasionally twine together in surprising ways.

Kingsolver’s dual narrative works beautifully here. A dual narrative needs to be not only well choreographed, but also, more important, necessary. But Kingsolver is a novelist with more elaborate plans. On its own, this economic-disaster narrative would be a sharp, if polemical, cautionary tale, an indictment of American life at an inflection point. In Unsheltered, she has given us another densely packed and intricately imagined book. Kingsolver has long written socially, politically and environmentally alert novels that engage with the wider world and its complications and vulnerabilities.

Unsheltered barbara kingsolver review