Prodigal Summer is Barbara Kingsolver's fifth novel, published in 2001, and her latest as of January 2004. It is a
story set somewhere in the southern Appalachian mountains of the United
States. The events are centred in Zebulon County, around the curiously named
town of Egg Fork. Nature, women, men, and the relationships between are the
main themes of this tale.
In fact, the story is strongly focussed on women. This is a supremely feminine
novel. Kingsolver alternates chapters between the points of view of three
characters: two women named Lusa Landowski and Deanna Wolfe, and old Garnett
Walker, whose masculine viewpoint is largely a vehicle for the portrayal of a
third woman, Nannie Rawley. A remarkable aspect of this work is that the three
protagonists function seemingly independently of each other throughout the
whole book, and that each of their respective chapters has its own title.
Deanna's chapters are called Predators, Lusa's Moth
Love, and Garnett's are Old Chestnuts. In a sense, it is almost
like reading three different novels, because the characters have almost no
direct interaction with one another, but this is exactly the illusion that
Kingsolver wants to dissipate. Above all, this is a story about
interconnectivity, about the relation that all life holds to itself, about how
nothing happens in isolation.
But solitude is only a human presumption. Every
quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot; every choice is a world made
new for the chosen. All secrets are witnessed.
So we read in the first
paragraph. Remember this.
As the pages turn, we are drawn into the life of a solitary woman who sniffs
tree stumps so as to ascertain the presence of predators, a bobcat in this
case. This is Deanna, a lone forest ranger who after having gone through an
ordinary life of society, school, university, career, and marriage now feels
more at home in the company of snakes, warblers, coyotes, and the trees that
shelter them all and herself too. She lives cut off from the world of humans
in a little cabin in the woods where she receives monthly supplies that the
U.S. Forest Service provides in exchange for the care she gives to the
mountain. She was faring quite well by herself, thank you very much, until the
ferociously beautiful sheep rancher Eddie Bondo came all the way from Wyoming
with his gun to Zebulon County. There she was then, reconciling the calls of
the wild towards this man's taut body with her own sense of quasi motherly
duty for protecting a fledgling family of coyotes from his thirty-thirty
rifle.
But before we can fully settle into Deanna's recluse in nature, the next
chapter brings us to Lusa and her farmer of a husband Cole Widener. The young
newlyweds are already having a rocky marriage. Lusa is a young woman from
Lexington, an outsider, a city girl in Egg Fork, living for the first time the
role of farmer's wife and having difficulties adjusting. But Lusa has always
been an outsider, from her very birth to a Jewish Polish father and a Muslim
Palestinian mother. In the country, where nature is not a romantic notion
outside of which to write poetry but a reality threatening to kick down the
front door if you're not careful, she cannot understand her husband's urge to
spray defoliant over the honeysuckle crawling over their hedgerows. What harm
could an innocent weed do? With Cole, she is also drowned in a family of
in-laws who can at best tolerate her urban peculiarities. Back in the
university, when she met and fell in love with Cole who was sent away by his
family to a special farming program, she used to study moths and their mating
habits. She is an entomologist, a moth scientist, and her field is moth love. Suddenly, her
marriage finished before it could get started. Just like the moths who
communicate by scent, a waft of honeysuckle from across the field announced in
her kitchen that Cole was not coming home for dinner that night. It is up to
her now to manage by herself the Widener place, and to find herself in
it despite her five uncomprehending sisters-in-law.
In the next two pages we come to a very brief introduction to Garnett. A
widower of eight years, Garnett is a tired old man, practical, knowledgable,
somewhat fussy and crotchety, and delightfully old-fashioned. The death of his
wife has not shaken his faith in God in the least bit, but it has made it
difficult to get up in the mornings in a solitary bed for the past eight
years. Perhaps it would not all be so difficult for him were it not for that
troublesome neighbour of his, Nannie Rawley. She is a progressive elderly
woman, who went to university and later in her life replaced lectures with
services in a Unitarian church. She would be more tolerable if only she would
not be so stubborn in refusing to use modern chemical pesticides in her
garden, like any decent person would. No, instead she prefers more "natural"
alternatives, as she calls them, and this has been Garnett's bane. The
Japanese beetles will soon be nibbling all over his chestnut trees if
Nannie doesn't give her own the proper care. But Garnett would rather remain a
civil neighbour as far as possible and is willing to tolerate all of her
eccentricities. He believes in loving his neighbour, difficult as it may be
sometimes. This tolerance, however, only goes so far, and he suspects that
Nannie's garden may harbour a coven of bra-burning Unitarian witches. He
prefers not to spread his suspicions, because, like I said before, he is a
tired old man who mostly tends to his own garden. Mostly.
Thus begins the stories, or story. The singular soon replaces the plural in
successive chapters, because slim gossamer threads of interconnectivity
between the stories reveal themselves. This interplay of human affairs mirrors
the dependencies found in nature, in which every character is constantly
immersed in different ways. Deanna wants to protect nature and be as much a
part of it as reasonably possible, which may or may not leave room for Eddie
Bondo. Lusa will have to come to grips in her own way with Cole's farming
preoccupations and has her own reconciling to do, with nature, and with Cole's
family. Garnett's quest to resucitate the American chestnut tree in his own
garden (they were wiped out by a fungus in the early twentieth century, the
infamous chestnut blight) will eventually lead him to understand his
relationship with Nannie Rawley and, in turn, with nature. This book wants to
promote that it is somewhat artificial, pardon the expression, to separate
human relationships from relationships with nature, because they are intensely
alike to each other. Every character has a very specific function and purpose
in this story, as does in nature every beetle, moth, sparrow, rabbit, and
coyote.
Allow me to speak a bit further about the portrayal of nature we find here. As
a person who has lived most of their life in cities, I am mayhaps justified in
still having a romantic ideal of what nature should be like. This novel has
little time for views like mine. Nature is a very practical thing, all around us,
and inside us too. We must farm it or ranch it to feed, sometimes hold it
back, and always protect it. To be sure, Garnett is perhaps chasing after a
romantic ideal by wanting to return the American chestnut to the woodlands,
Deanna seems overzealous to Eddie Bondo in her protection of the coyotes, and
Lusa's family thinks her naïve for refusing to grow tobacco, their main cash
crop, but there is nothing stupidly romantic about the pursuits of these
characters. These are genuine concerns, real problems they face, and we face them
too. Kingsolver's background as a biologist is evident everywhere. Nature is
real, practical, and all around us. It also happens to be astonishingly
beautiful.
About the beauty in this novel, allow me to make a few remarks too. This
work is deeply sensual, in the full sense of the word. Each new description of
a moth that Kingsolver gives us can be experienced with five senses. We can
smell coyote scat and cherry jam, appreciate the colours in moth's wings, and
savour the big fat turkey who gobbled his last less than an hour ago and is
now roasting on a stick. And that's not all. Sensuality includes the erotic,
and there is plenty of that too. Summer is in full bloom, "the season of extravagant procreation" as the title
suggests, and mating season for humans is all year 'round. Kingsolver knows how
to speak the language of love. Selected portion of this book are therefore
best read in comfortable solitude or in the company of someone who is willing
to share some intimacy. During the summer, everyone is drumming up business,
people included. It is all about women, remember, very credible erotics. Enjoy.
The feminity seeps through every page of this novel. Garnett's chapters are
really excuses to talk about Nannie Rawley through a man's antiquated voice,
and to poke a little fun at his ways. For example, at some point Kingsolver
presents her own views on evolution, for no modern biologist can resist the temptation
to say a few things about natural selection. She uses Garnett to present Creationism while Nannie is the calm
woman, the practical rationalist in favour of Darwinism. This trend is found
elsewhere in the book. Eddie Bondo would be happy if all the coyotes were
exterminated, but his relationship with Deanna prevents him; Lusa wants to
give farming a hand more tender than Cole could provide, and so on. And women
keep getting their way, often after much hard work. In Kingsolver's book,
it is the woman who reigns supreme, the mediator between man and nature.
Somehow, it all works out fine in the end.
Prodigal Summer is the narrative of a small community nestled in the
mountains, and this community comprises of much more than just humans.
Short of going to the southern Appalachian mountains and seeing for yourself
all the abundance of life that Barbara Kingsolver describes, reading her book
is a fantastic way of getting a taste of the world outside and our liaisons
inside. I thoroughly recommend reading it at least once.