![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() However, she has no sooner established Willa’s family tragedy and the building’s subsidence issues than she whisks us back 150 years to a parallel Vineland and a new heroine, Mary Treat.īoth Vineland and Treat are historical entities: Vineland was a utopian colony with a demagogical leader Treat a biologist and radical thinker who corresponded with Darwin. Kingsolver’s novel is set in a Tyleresque house, too, albeit one in Vineland, New Jersey rather than Baltimore: an ancient, scruffy family pad with an ailing grandfather in the attic, hippyish grown children frolicking through the kitchen, and serious ongoing repair problems. Tyler’s heroine, in a trademark Tyler accident, is given the care of a child presumed to be her son’s Kingsolver’s Willa, with equally typical politicised realism, takes on her baby grandson when her daughter-in-law dies in a suicide that is blamed in ruthless detail on the American healthcare system and millennial economic pressures on graduates. ![]() Perhaps they are even appointing her their intellectual grandmother, as each novel opens with a Willa having active grandmothering thrust upon her. Presumably, both senior American novelists are paying tribute to their forebear Willa Cather, and the centenary of her masterpiece, My Ántonia. L ike Anne Tyler’s recent Clock Dance, Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel has a heroine named Willa. ![]()
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