Barbara Kingsolver’s Artists and Idols

(NYTBR) ... Barbara Kingsolver’s breathtaking new novel, “Lacuna,” follows this quiet, dreamy boy, Harrison William Shepherd, from 1929 to 1951. When we first meet him, he’s 12 years old, living at a hacienda on Isla Pixol with his self-dramatizing mother, Salomé, both of them petrified by the howling monkeys in the trees above, which they believe to be carnivorous demons. “You had better write all this in your notebook,” Salomé tells Shepherd, “so when nothing is left of us but bones, someone will know where we went.” Continued

Photo: "Portrait of Diego Rivera and Frida [Kahlo] Rivera" (Carl Van Vechten/Library of Congress).