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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