Kingsolver revisiting Tucson to tout 'The Lacuna'

Once she settled onto her Virginia farm, she began her research in earnest. It took her a total of seven years and thousands of miles of traveling between the U.S. and Mexico. There she spent endless days "in the human residences as well as the historical archives" of renowned Mexican artist Frida Kahlo; Kahlo's communist husband, painter Diego Rivera; and Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. She got to know the history, the times and their stories, which she invaded with her fictional character Harrison William Shepherd.

When she was home on the farm - hours from where she grew up - she studied newspapers and magazines from the tumultuous 1930s through the '50s - the time frame of her new novel, "The Lacuna" - to get a feel for the era.

Then she started writing. And rewriting. And rewriting some more, until she completed what is being called her most ambitious book to date.

In an interview last week, as she prepared for a three-week book tour that brings her to Tucson next Friday, Kingsolver talked about why it took her so long to write "The Lacuna," her first novel in nine years. The book came out Tuesday.

"That's a long time for anyone. It's a big book. The research was an enormous undertaking."

"Well, I've been curious for many years about what strikes me as an uncomfortable relationship between art and politics in the United States. It's unique to this country. Other parts of the world, people consider it sort of an ordinary responsibility of artists to raise the big questions about power and social mores and the relationships between class, gender, ethnicity, power. . . . Mexico celebrates some of its most political artists as national heroes. We don't do that here, to put it mildly. . . .

"In 2001, after 9/11, when I saw that this country had an opportunity to really examine ourselves through the lens of the rest of the world - the terrorist attack on the U.S. was sort of a moment of self-consciousness, when we really had to ask who are we in the world - and what I saw was that the national mood did not lean toward self-examination or self-criticism.

"The extent of self-examination was expressed in 'Are you with us or against us?' That's when I realized that as a nation, we're not just uneasy with political artists. We're uneasy with self-criticism in general. . . . I thought it probably went back to the middle of the last century, to the McCarthy era, when this country censored artists quite severely. People lost their jobs and even went to prison for questioning the status quo.