Barbara Kingsolver’s Superficial View of the American Family in the Trump Era

Unsheltered, by Barbara Kingsolver, is about a middle-class family struggling to make ends meet as the 2016 presidential primaries unfold. “One underemployed breadwinner, five dependents,” Kingsolver writes of the Knox-Tavoularis family, whose members are designed to represent variously aggrieved members of the white American electorate. At the center of the novel is Willa, a magazine editor turned freelance writer. In her orbit are her husband, Iano, a tenure-track professor turned adjunct instructor; her son, Zeke, a Harvard graduate turned unemployed single father; her daughter, Tig, a Millennial loner turned leftist organizer; her dying father-in-law, Nick, a blue-collar worker turned Trump supporter; and Zeke’s infant son, Dusty, heir to a doomed future.

The novel, Kingsolver’s eighth, chronicles Willa’s attempt to save her dead aunt’s house, a crumbling Victorian mansion in . An (actual) old Temperance town whose soil once made it attractive to glassmakers and chicken farmers and the founders of Welch’s Grape Juice, Vineland lost its raison d’être , along with many of the town’s jobs and a noticeable portion of its white people. The Knox-Tavoularis family has since inherited the house, and Willa sees signs of Vineland’s decline everywhere. When she glances at the yard of her neighbor Jorge, she sees a “vehicle boneyard” and hears “intermittent Spanish expletives of frustration or success”