Prodigal
Summer
by Barbara Kingsolver
2000, Harper Collins: NY
Reviewed
by Amy Lenzo
The
depth of Barbara Kingsolvers joyous love affair with nature
is reflected in all her work, but perhaps nowhere so beautifully
as here, in her latest novel Prodigal Summer.
Each
and every character in this richly woven, tri-partite novel has
his or her hopes, dreams and fears set firmly within the larger
web of life they are an indelible part of. Their love
stories and this is a novel of love stories like you have
likely never heard them told before are played out in the
wild grace and profusion of nature in the forested mountains and
small farming homesteads of southern Appalachias Zebulon Valley.
As
you may have surmised by this time, nature is not just a backdrop
or creative foil for the human characters in this book.
To the contrary - the ways of nature are set within the story in
such a way as to make them as integral to her plot as they are to
all of us in real life. In her beautiful and simply designed web-site
(www.kingsolver.com)
Barbara Kingsolver has a dialogue section where she
has responded to readers questions. Here is Barbaras
advice to a reader who asks what she should be looking for in the
book:
"
if you really want my guidance on Prodigal Summer I'd ask you
to read slowly; this is the most challenging book Ive ever
given my readers. Several reviewers have completely missed what
the book is about, because they paid no attention to anything
beyond human plot on the shallowest level. This novel is not exclusivelyor
even mainlyabout humans. There is no main character. My
agenda is to lure you into thinking about whole systems, not just
individual parts. The story asks for a broader grasp of connections
and interdependencies than is usual in our culture."
Barbara
Kingsolver has a graduate degree in biology, and a strong background
in the sciences and natural history - she knows of what she speaks
and it seems that everyone in this novel is similarly invested
in a relationship with nature. One of the plot threads involves
Deanna, a wildlife biologist who lives in a secluded cabin in a
wilderness preserve on the mountain. In her solitary job as a ranger
studying wildlife on the preserve, she has just discovered a den
of coyotes, whose secret she very much wants to protect. But at
just about the same time, she is discovered herself, by a lone mountain
hunter named Eddie Bondo, whose intrusion into this paradise she
cannot (and does not want to) resist.
Another
story revolves around a young widow, Lusa, who left a promising
academic career as an entomologist in Lexington to marry Cole, and
move with him back to Zebulon Valley, where hed grown up.
Cole dies in a freak accident soon after they arrived and leaves
her to inherit the family farm along with the barely concealed hostility
of his sisters.
One
of Lusas neighbors is a crusty old man named Garnett, who
holds the secret to her survival on the land there, he no less dependent
on another neighbor, Nannie Rawley, who holds the key to his own
future. These stories all intersect and interweave on the human
level much like they do within their natural environments, and the
whole picture works very much like a satisfying puzzle that fits
together perfectly as the shapes of individual pieces are gradually
revealed.
Here
is an excerpt from the novel, where Deanna has been sitting in the
underbrush all morning with her binoculars, waiting for a sign of
the coyotes she thought shed found:
"Deanna
knew exactly when the morning ended. She never wore a watch, and
for this she didnt need one. She knew when the air grew
still enough that she could hear caterpillars overhead, newly
hatched, eating through thousands of leaves on their way to becoming
Io and luna moths, In the next hour the breeze would shift. No
sense in taking a chance; it was time to leave and shed
still seen nothingno movement, no sign. No little dogs,
fox-like and wolf-like and cousin to both, so familiar from her
studies that they sometimes ran through her dreams. Awake, shed
had good long looks at only one single animal, a pathetic captive
that shed rather forget, in the Tinkers Mountain Zoo
outside of Knoxville. Shes pleaded with the curator to change
the exhibit, explaining that coyotes were social, and that displaying
a single animal was therefore not just cruel but also inaccurate.
She had offered him her services: a graduate student in wildlife
biology, finishing up a thesis on the coyote range extension in
the twentieth century. The curator had politely suggested that
if she wanted to see coyotes in groups she should take a trip
out west, where the animals were so common that people got acquainted
with them as roadkill. The conversation had given her a stomachache.
So shed written a grant proposal instead, invented this
job, and put herself in it as soon as shed completed and
defended her thesis. Shed had to fight some skeptics, wrangling
a rare agreement between the Park Service, the Forest Service,
and the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, so that there
were almost more words on her paycheck than dollars. But it was
working out fine, they all seemed to think now. Two years after
her arrival, one of the most heavily poached ranges of southern
Appalachia was becoming an intact ecosystem again. All of that
was the point, but to her mind only partly so.
She
breathed out now, resigned. One day shed lay eyes on wily
Canis latrans in the wild, right here on her own home range, on
an animal path cross-stitched by other trails to the paths shed
walked in her childhood. But it wouldnt be this day.
On
her way back up the mountain she consciously slowed her step.
She heard another magnolia warblera sign and a wonder, it
seemed to her, like something risen from the dead. So many others
would never rise again: Bachmans warbler, passenger pigeon,
Carolina parakeet, Flints stonefly, Apamea mothso
many extinct creatures moved through the leaves just outside her
peripheral vision, for Deanna knew enough to realize that she
lived among ghosts. She deferred to the extinct as she would to
the spirits of deceased relatives, paying her quiet respects in
the places where they might once have been. Little red wolves
stood as silent shadows at the edges of clearings, while the Carolina
parakeets would have chattered loudly, moving along the riverbanks
in huge flocks of dazzling green and orange. The early human settlers
migrating into this region had loved them and promptly killed
them. Now most people would call you crazy if you told them that
something as exotic as a parrot had once been at home in these
homely southern counties."
Environmental
and political activist Barbara Kingsolver consciously utilizes material
she is passionate about, writing in a way designed to catalyze a
much-needed awakening in attitudes about environmental and social
justice policies, but this doesnt mean that her books are
dry, or read like political tracts. A very popular writer, who has
had many books on the best-seller list over the years, Kingsolver
is read by all sorts of people and is a great example of the creative
power that art and artists wield. The arguments and perspectives
that form the scaffolding for her fiction take her where no petition
or protest, no matter how eloquent, could
directly into the
homes and hearts and minds of the wide audience that reads her.
If
you are new to her charms as a writer, you will no doubt enjoy following
this delicious beginning with some of Barbara Kingsolvers
earlier work. Start with her series about an abandoned Native American
child and her adopted mother The Bean Trees, Pigs
in America and Animal Dreams. Then there is the excellent
High Tide in Tucson, a collection of environmental and scientific
essays, and the best-selling Poisonwood Bible, a cautionary
tale of a missionary family in Africa.
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