Barbara Kingsolver's fifth novel is a hymn to wildness that celebrates the prodigal spirit of human nature, and of nature itself. It weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives amid the mountains and farms of southern Appalachia. Over the course of one humid summer, this novel's intriguing protagonists face disparate predicaments but find connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with which they necessarily share a place.
There is no one in contemporary literature quite like Barbara Kingsolver. Her dialogue sparkles with sassy wit and earthy poetry; her descriptions are rooted in daily life but are also on familiar terms with the eternal. With Prodigal Summer, she returns from the Congo to a "wrinkle on the map that lies between farms and wildness." And there, in an isolated pocket of southern Appalachia, she recounts not one but three intricate stories.
Exuberant, lush, riotous--the summer of the novel is "the season of extravagant procreation" in which bullfrogs carelessly lay their jellied masses of eggs in the grass, "apparently confident that their tadpoles would be able to swim through the lawn like little sperms," and in which a woman may learn to "tell time with her skin." It is also the summer in which a family of coyotes moves into the mountains above Zebulon Valley:
The ghost of a creature long extinct was coming in on silent footprints, returning to the place it had once held in the complex anatomy of this forest like a beating heart returned to its body. This is what she believed she would see, if she watched, at this magical juncture: a restoration.
The "she" is Deanna Wolfe, a wildlife biologist observing the coyotes from her isolated aerie--isolated, that is, until the arrival of a young hunter who makes her even more aware of the truth that humans are only an infinitesimal portion in the ecological balance. This truth forms the axis around which the other two narratives revolve: the story of a city girl, entomologist, and new widow and her efforts to find a place for herself; and the story of Garnett Walker and Nannie Rawley, who seem bent on thrashing out the countless intimate lessons of biology as only an irascible traditional farmer and a devotee of organic agriculture can. As Nannie lectures Garnett, "Everything alive is connected to every other by fine, invisible threads. Things you don't see can help you plenty, and things you try to control will often rear back and bite you, and that's the moral of the story."
Structurally, that gossamer web is the story: images, phrases, and events link the narratives, and these echoes are rarely obvious, always serendipitous. Kingsolver is one of those authors for whom the terrifying elegance of nature is both aesthetic wonder and source of a fierce and abiding moral vision. She may have inherited Thoreau's mantle, but she piles up riches of her own making, blending her extravagant narrative gift with benevolent concise humor. She treads the line between the sentimental and the glorious like nobody else in American literature. --Kelly Flynn
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0
A beautiful read!:
When i first started this book, I wrote, "Kingsolver seduces the reader into the book with her lyrical and poetic writing.". If I'd only known how prophetic that was! This is a beautiful book to be read slowly and savored. The story takes place over one summer and tells three stories of love. The language and phrasing is so beautiful that I had to stop periodically and let what I had read sink in. It literally took my breath away in so many places. This is not a "beach read". You need time to... more info
A very satifyiing eco-novel:
This low-key eco-novel grew on me, organically, which is fitting given its subject. Parallel story lines all have as a theme the emotional and moral commitment of the characters to sustainable human life in the modern world. It is not in the least preachy, and the characters are not proselytizers, but rather sympathetic personalities seeking to fit into a web of interdependent fellow persons and other life, both animal and vegetable. The forest ranger with a brief for coyotes, the young widow who finds... more info
A very saisfying eco-novel:
This low-key eco-novel grew on me, organically, which is fitting given its subject. Parallel story lines all have as a theme the emotional and moral commitment of the characters to sustainable human life in the modern world. It is not in the least preachy, and the characters are not proselytizers, but rather sympathetic personalities seeking to fit into a web of interdependent fellow persons and other life, both animal and vegetable. The forest ranger with a brief for coyotes, the young widow who finds... more info
Wonderful Book:
This is a book about three women, one in her twenties, one in her forties and one in her seventies. But I'm an older man and I loved it. Beautifully written woth a profound understanding of human nature and relationships.
