Unsheltered is a book about two people, separated by a hundred years or so, who live in the same house in Vineland, New Jersey. The contemporary story follows Willa Knox, a downsized journalist, as she navigates financial difficulty, political turmoil, and a whole series of family crises. The parallel story follows Thatcher Greenwood, a teacher at the newly established high school in the meticulously planned community that is late-nineteenth century Vineland.

It’s a fine attempt to depict characters struggling to keep their lives in order during chaotic times. Thatcher has unwillingly become the lightning rod for anti-Darwinian ideologues, who unfortunately for him include his boss. Willa’s foes are not quite as easy to pin down: nativism, inequality, the sheer injustice of capitalism, and so forth. Helpfully, each of these characters has a quirky, iconoclastic friend who guides them out of their difficulties - Willa has her daughter Antigone and Thatcher has his next-door neighbor, who just so happens to be the highly-accomplished biologist Mary Treat. The story is reasonably interesting, the plot moves along nicely, and the dual narratives are nicely tied together - there’s a device by which the final words for one chapter become the title of the next. There are many similarities between the two storylines, but they don’t come across as too-cute somehow.

The joining point between the two storylines is the house in which both Thatcher and Willa live. It’s something of a shambles, we learn early on, and that becomes the emblem for the slow unraveling of both Thatcher’s life and Willa’s. It is also the mechanism by which Kingsolver delivers her solution to turmoil and uncertain times - in brief, it is to release our connection to material things. It’s not a terrible moral, given what a difficult world both characters inhabit, though it isn’t very convincing as a resolution for their troubles.

There is, unfortunately, some way in which the story just falls flat a bit. Perhaps it’s that it’s just a bit too didactic, particularly when it comes to Antigone’s monologues about Cuba - these are just a little too simplistic and romanticized to be very interesting. The larger points that she makes, about minimalism and cooperation, are all very fine, but the speechifying is a little tiresome. Then, again, there are interesting themes which just don’t seem to materialize. Antigone’s name teases an allusion to Greek myth, but there’s really nothing very interesting in that allusion. Thatcher’s tendency towards - for lack of a better term - botanomorphizing his friends and family seems like it should set up some kind of wonderfully climactic scene in a greenhouse or something, but nothing of the sort actually comes to pass. It’s a shame, because these themes are ripe for fascinating treatment in Kingsolver’s capable hands, but it just doesn’t seem to be in the cards for this book. Unsheltered pales in comparison to some of her earlier work, especially The Lacuna.

It’s certainly an entertaining book - but it doesn’t quite measure up to Kingsolver’s high standard.