Unsheltered

A review of the novel I mentioned in class, Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver. I'm wondering about the scene involving the protagonist's father-in-law being turned away from the university health center. Realistic? Is the 1986 law Elizabeth mentioned in her presentation yesterday relevant? (See the bold passage below...)

When we fantasize about other people’s houses, whether they’re online or on TV shows or around the corner from where we live, we seem to imagine them as gleaming-surfaced oases of tranquillity. And even in our dreams, houses often offer more than we had thought was there: a corridor we hadn’t known about, a hidden wing. But when we enter a walled space inside a novel, we often expect, and in fact go out of our way to seek, trouble. While the term “real estate porn” describes our ecstatic obsession with the ways in which a handful of lucky people get to live and the rest of us generally don’t, there seems to be no obvious term to characterize the literature that limns the trouble that invariably takes place inside fictional houses, whether they are claustrophobic, haunted or simply falling apart. But we are drawn to these houses just the same, not by the dream of tranquillity, but by the durable, and far more interesting, pull of complexity, and even the possibility of impending catastrophe.

From the very first line of “Unsheltered,” Barbara Kingsolver lures us into such a house: “The simplest thing would be to tear it down,” says the contractor offering his professional opinion to Willa Knox, who has inherited this unstable Vineland, N.J., brick house into which she and her husband, Iano Tavoularis, have moved after losing their jobs. The magazine where she was an editor has closed, and so has the college where he taught, and they have relocated here from Virginia so Iano can take a new teaching job nearby. But even the inheritance won’t provide stability, and the couple find themselves vulnerable and strained in all ways. Not least of it is that they are taking care of Iano’s father, Nick, a Greek immigrant who is free with his racist observations, in addition to being beset by medical issues requiring expensive treatment. After being given the runaround at the university health complex, Willa challenges the receptionist: “The best you can do is send him home to fill up his shoes with blood? I think what you’re saying is, the man needs to die.”
(continues)