Too preachy for me: Kingsolver's "Unsheltered"

Two complicated families, one living in 2016, one in 1874; both live in the same town, same address. They suffer from the same problems, including that in both cases, their houses are falling down and they don't have the money to rebuild them safely. Why no money? Because the man of the household in both cases is trying to make a living as an academic/teacher, and the pay is terrible. The danger of being without a roof over one's head -- that is, unsheltered -- becomes a metaphor for their problems: personal, political, social, and global. This is the fundamental theme of Barbara Kingsolver's new novel Unsheltered.

In both eras covered in the book, the majority of the population is refusing to acknowledge that times are changing. In the 19th century, bombastic demagogues attack the new intellectual currents, especially Darwinism. In the 20th century, the planet is due for self-destruction, and a bombastic demagogue is about to win the Presidential election.

The characters in the book discuss every aspect of the issues at great length. Too great. Each character stands for one aspect of the global problems with demagogues, resources, and the relationship between men and women and their place in society. It's Barbara Kingsolver, so these characters are totally believable, but the entire novel to me just comes across as preachy and too pat.

I'll describe just one character to try to illustrate how each character takes on a more or less allegorical significance, and talks about it all the time. Antigone, nickname Tig, is essentially the key to quite a bit of the philosophy that's constantly discussed. She's in her late 20s, but living with her mother Willa (laid-off journalist), father Iano (professor who lost tenure when a university failed and in his fifties, is back on the academic nomad track), grandfather Nick (retired laborer who hates Obama and immigrants despite having been one, and is an offensive racist and Trump supporter in the election that's going on), and nephew Dusty (infant son of Tig's brother who has more or less abandoned his child).

Tig and her family live in their inherited falling down house on the site that over a century earlier belonged to another threatened teacher named Thatcher, who had another falling down house. Thatcher was a follower of Darwin, and engaged in public debates of Darwinism that sound pretty much like "Inherit the Wind." Tig's journalist mother is researching Thatcher and his next-door neighbor named Mary Treat; she was a highly accomplished amateur observational biologist who corresponded with Darwin, Asa Grey, and other famous people. As it happens, Mary Treat and a few other townspeople are real historical figures among all the fictional people in the novel.

Tig had spent several years in Cuba and is now having a closer and closer relationship with her Puerto Rican boyfriend Jorge. He's a paragon of humanity who lives next door: same location as Mary Treat once lived. Tig alone of her family recognizes the paradoxes of too much consumption. She can see that the resources of the planet are limited, and humanity is about to experience a dramatic disaster. She tries to encourage responsibility,  re-use of everything, more self-sufficiency, and restraint in her life and in the lives of her parents. She's highly critical of the thinking that brought every one, including her parents to this point of no return when the planet will face hunger and want and so on. But she's much more understanding than her parents when it comes to her grandfather's rants about the people and politicians he hates and even when he attacks Jorge and his family because he hates immigrants and Hispanics.

Some might call this a novel of ideas, where almost every conversation, no matter how it starts, quickly gets to be about these big BIG issues: how to save the planet or why the tenure system is so terrible or how there's so much inequality. It just didn't work for me. I found especially the very long public debates of the 19th century characters to be irritating and somewhat trite, and the conversations of the present-day characters to be pretty predictable like the news analysis and commentary that I read every day.

But this is Barbara Kingsolver. I expect more from her -- I was hoping for a book as good as The Poisonwood Bible (published 1998) or The Lacuna (published 2009). There are flashes, but not enough. An example of the good: when Tig and Jorge cook dinner from almost nothing in the house while he tells about his family and their history, and they discuss the problems of Nick, who is in very bad shape. First Jorge, in what seems to be an empty larder, finds sugar and a bag of cornmeal.

"He adjusted the burner expertly, as if any normal household might have a twenty-year-old camp stove seated atop a defunct kitchen range. Willa didn't mind him taking over the situation....  

"She watched him stir salt, sugar, and butter into the water as it came to a boil. ... 

"'Mmm sorrullos,' Tig said happily. She tied an apron around Jorge's middle to keep his shirttail out of the fire and then stood next to him watching the saucepan boil, leaning on him slightly like a friendly dog. Willa executed her assignment, grating a pile of yellow cheese onto a blue plate. ...  

"Jorge ... was stirring cornmeal into the boiling water in a meditative way, thickening it into a yellow batter... Jorge took Willa's plate of cheese and stirred it into his batter.

"Jorge rubbed oil into his hands and began rolling the steaming batter between his palms into fat little cigars." (pp. 358-361)

Meanwhile while engaging in the continuing conversation, Tig slices and fries some plantains, and then Jorge fries his cornmeal cigars and refries the plantains, serving them to the hungry family. They bite into the plate of golden corn fritters. We the readers appreciate how this meal was made of the most basic and inexpensive and environmentally wonderful ingredients.

Yes, it's vivid. But too preachy, I think.

Some reviewers were more positive than I am. The New York Times review was highly positive. The review by Ron Charles in the Washington Post is maybe a little less enthusiastic; it's titled: "In Barbara Kingsolver’s ‘Unsheltered,’ Trump is just the latest threat to Earth’s survival." This review says that Unsheltered is "the first major novel to tackle the Trump era straight on and place it in the larger chronicle of existential threats" and refers to it as "a collage of Democratic talking points acted out in the lives of a middle-class family slipping down the ladder of success." He liked it on the whole better than I did, especially the historic chapters, though I think agreed with me that it's a bit preachy.

The NPR reviewer, Ilana Masad, was more positive yet in her review, "Barbara Kingsolver Captures The Feeling Of Being 'Unsheltered.'" She summarizes her reaction thus: "Kingsolver doesn't give us solutions, but she reminds us to take comfort in one another when we can, and that hope is necessary even when all seems lost."

Well, I'm not so sure of this. My final reaction: disappointment.