Prodigal Summer.
Barbara Kingsolver. 2000. HarperCollins
Publishers, Inc., New York. 444 pp., hardbound.
Much
modern environmental writing, fiction or non, is romantic,
with its celebration of unspoiled nature, its appeal to the
senses, and its nostalgia for the purer, wilder, real-er past
that we could return to if only we would open our eyes and
save our souls from modern-day devils. Its vision for the
future is the past. In Prodigal Summer, Barbara Kingsolver
seems firmly in the grip of romanticism.
Set in the forests and farms of Appalachia, its interwoven tales unfold over the course of one summer, when the very air seethes with the wanton behavior of multiplying life forms: “…prodigal summer, the season of extravagant procreation. It could wear out everything in its path with its passionate excesses, but nothing alive with wings or a heart or a seed curled into itself in the ground could resist welcoming it back when it came.” For biologist Deanna Wolfe, this particular summer is all the more magical for the breeding coyotes that have moved into the mountain reserve where her job is “keeping an eye on paradise.” Confident she can protect her coyotes from the shotguns of the valley’s sheep farmers, she is less sure of warding off the attractive young bounty hunter who charms his way into her self-imposed solitude. Can she persuade this would-be Wyoming sheep rancher of the merits of predators, and so trust him in her forest?
As Deanna crisscrosses the reserve keeping track of the coyotes’ progress and misleading her hunter, we learn the mostly tragic history of this place, of passenger pigeons and Carolina parakeets and heath hens now vanished. Kingsolver does leaven the gloom with wry humor: “In the same plaintive tone her single friends used to complain that all the best men were married, Deanna felt like whining, ‘All the best species are extinct.’”
In the valley below, a young woman is coming to grips with the death of her husband of just one year. A city person trained as an entomologist, Lusa Landowski finds the family farm she is left to care for a fantastic burden, both physically arduous and morally challenging. What’s a poor farmer to do when the only crop that earns its keep is tobacco? Amid the resentment of her sisters-in-law who don’t believe she belongs on their family home, Lusa struggles to overcome her grief and establish her own place on the farm and in the valley her husband loved as much as he loved her.
Also living in the valley is Garnett Walker, a lonely old man at war with a changed world, personified by his elderly and free-spirited neighbor, Nannie Rawley. Each believes the other is damaging the farm on their side of the fence with their ways. As they squabble over pesticides and compost piles and organic produce, Garnett tries to resist caving into Nannie’s admittedly well reasoned arguments against chemicals and for beneficial insects even as he is more and more drawn to her company. Garnett is easily the most poignantly drawn character in Prodigal Summer. This proud champion of manicured farmscapes managed with chemicals is devoting his retirement to selectively breeding chestnuts, in hopes of finding a blight-resistant strain and thus restoring this once-abundant species. A highly principled man, he is pained to find that he might have done wrong.
In playing out these soap opera-like stories, Barbara Kingsolver also systematically runs down her list of environmental issues to raise. Invasive plants? Check. Logging? Check. Poachers? Check. Pesticides? Check. Despite these formulaic flaws, however, Prodigal Summer rises above the average romance—and you learn a lot too. Her writing is lyrical, and her descriptions of the natural world are precise and vivid. In fact, this corner of Applachia is a much better developed character than some of the personalities who people it.
In the end, Kingsolver also reveals a less romantic, more optimistic bent. She transcends her long lament for paradise lost and leaves her characters wanting to live fully in the present. Deanna, who feels the loss of species most keenly, decides, “She would step somehow from the realm of ghosts she’d inhabited all her life to commit herself irrevocably to the present...today she had paid little mind to the sadness of lost things moving through the leaves at the edge of her vision, the shadowy little wolves and the bright-winged parakeets hopping wistfully through the unused cockleburs.” In part this transformation comes from watching the coyote family survive the summer and become part—a wonderful part—of the changed landscape. Lusa and Garnett, too, make new connections to place, and face their futures with renewed faith in the power of nature, and neighbors, to give meaning to life.
Prodigal Summer can be read with pleasure at many levels: as love story, as environmental history, as paean to place. Reading it will be a perfect way to while away some of your summer.—Susan Lumpkin
ZooGoer 30(2) 2001. Copyright
2001 Friends of the National Zoo. All rights reserved.
