The beliefs with which she was raised – that hard work and education bring security, that children will have a better life than their parents – now look like collective wishful thinking. “How could two hardworking people do everything right in life and arrive in their fifties essentially destitute?” she wonders. The rising medical costs of caring for Willa’s infirm father-in-law are also keeping her up at night. But it’s falling apart, and without a large sum of money to fix it up, it’ll soon be uninhabitable.
The novel opens in 2015, with the couple relocating from Virginia to Vineland, New Jersey, where Willa has just inherited a house big enough to accommodate everyone. Iano, a professor of global politics, has lost his job (the college at which he taught has closed down), leaving them homeless (the college owned their house) as well as financially vulnerable (Willa is a freelance journalist). Willa and Iano are in no position to take on several dependents. For good measure, she adds a generation at either end: her protagonist, Willa Knox, finds herself living with her father-in-law and her son’s baby, as well as with her own husband Iano and their adult children. In Unsheltered, Barbara Kingsolver brings two baby boomers and their millennial children under one dilapidated roof in order to explore their different attitudes towards an increasingly uncertain future. In the US and the UK, a quarter of adults in their late twenties and early thirties are living with their parents, thanks to student debt, low-paying jobs and the cost of housing.
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