"The most important part of a story is the piece of it you don't know."
That's a recurrent theme in Barbara Kingsolver's new novel, "The Lacuna" -- a lacuna being something that is missing, usually from a manuscript. This may sound rather heady, but Kingsolver tells good stories about big ideas. This one is a historical novel narrated by the fictional half-Mexican, half-North American Harrison Shepherd, who forms a close relationship with painters Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and with revolutionary Leon Trotsky before launching his own literary career.
Shepherd is a sensitive, solitary man, not so much inclined to politics as he is unable to swallow the convenient lies society uses to keep ordinary people in their place. As a young adult in Mexico City, he is fascinated by Kahlo's flamboyance and drawn intellectually by Rivera's attempt to capture all of Mexican history in his work. He gets a job with Rivera mixing plaster for his murals and then becomes his cook. Trotsky joins the m