"A house at odds with itself": Barbara Kingsolver’s Unsheltered

This chapter analyzes Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Unsheltered as part of an emergent corpus of literary fiction that interrogates the meaning and the possibilities of living in the United States of the twenty-first-century. Conceived as a dual narrative that moves back and forth from 1871—the year that Charles Darwin published The Descent of Man—to 2016—the year of Donald Trump’s electoral win—, the novel deals with the struggles faced by a science high school teacher keen on exploring Darwinism against the conservative mores of his town, and an unemployed journalist facing the precariousness of the job market and family circumstances that have forced her to become a caretaker for her grandson. What connects these two characters is a crumbling house across the centuries, a house in a once-utopian community in New Jersey, that both in 1871 and 2016 is on the verge of collapse due to structural problems, “a mistake of construction,” a house that is “at odds with itself” (Kingsolver 42). This chapter explores how their persistence against the logic of their respective times and their efforts to keep a crumbling house standing can be read as political reflections on the meaning of home and nation, on the challenges posed by an increasingly tribal United States, and, ultimately, on the foundations we build as individuals, as community, and as nation.