“PRODIGAL SUMMER”, A Review
Of the three books I’ve read recently who mentioned Unitarianism in passing, all of them a few decades old, the funniest has been Barbara Kingsolver’s “Prodigal Summer”, three stories woven together in order to transmit a lot of biological material. She uses the tag to mean something like “hippie”, spoken from the outside. I don’t know whether she attends any such congregation but I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s a little old-fashioned to see them her way — kind of a Garrison Keillor way.
This view of the denomination doesn’t recognize that religious styles, like writing, go in and out of phases. In this book the Unitarians are California-style, does not acknowledge the Universalist side of the UUA, and has no notion of either the original rationality to the point of being called “God’s frozen people” in the style of Puritans. It doesn’t acknowledge the included “heresy” of Transdendentalism, which never quite left in the same way that Unitarianism of a kind never left the Northern Lutherans.
Kingsolver’s religion, one might say, is natural history with a political edge in the “Silent Spring” point of view: realizing what ecology is, the fitting together of disparate parts into a working whole that includes predators and prey, disaster and rescue.
People have said that I write like Kingsolver so I was curious. She writes in short chapter-episodes, which I also do. She slips in a lot of sly jokes by taking things literally — that is, speaking of metaphors as if they were reality. A person looking for someone’s farm sees a mailbox and asks, “Is that her?” The other answers: “No that’s her mailbox. She’s up at the house.” I do that, too.
And she likes to conclude a chapter with a wry little twist. The story about the biologist with a potent lover has a thread through it describing a beautiful moth on the window curtain that lays eggs though there is no chance an appropriate male moth will appear. The male lover is cautioned not to squash it. The female lover uses a paper cup and sheet of paper to gently capture it and toss it out the front door.
Immediately, a bug-eating bird swoops down to grab and swallow it. A dash of realistic vinegar on the romantic cupcake I used to do that but a lot of people objected, esp if it were in a sermon which is “supposed” to be reassuring and hopeful. Anyway, the eggs were fertile or they would not have been laid.
The writing is clear, detailed, and packed with things to know. Kingsolver is frank about using experts and naming them. The section about the couple arguing over the moth are matched with a female coyote coming in to fill the ecological niche once belonging to a red wolf, a small canid that ate rodents mostly. The man comes from a ranch out West where coyotes are hated predators. He’s a walking example of destructive intervention and, as is the point, he’s years younger than the woman who is at the limit of her fertility.
The second story is intriguing because it is ethnic difference that saves a young widow in the face of the community’s disapproval. Her new perspective on how to raise goats for profit expands the ecology. She “inherits” children from a dying sister-in-law without having to disentangle from the self-protecting family. Ecology is linked to family, whether or not it is genetic.
The third couple is a meditation on death, partly the death of the chestnut trees that once were so valued but succumbed to an arboreal pandemic from a virus brought in from China. Relevant? An ornery old man is trying to recover the trees by crossing the Asian chestnut to get the genes that resist the virus. His equally opinionated old female neighbor is fighting to make him stop using herbicides. Some of the most entertaining writing is from the point of view of the old man.
Tying this all up together is the last chapter, written from the point of view of the mama coyote. Interestingly, the coyote pack is interpreted as being a sisterhood, sharing the birthing and hunting. Not much about male alphas, not much about how sly and damaging a coyote can be, not anything about cubs dying.
What this adds up to is a salable book with an audience among a certain subset of educated white women with discretionary income and time to sit reading. These people are alert to the growing environmental problems but still governed by the ethics of motherhood. In short, Moms.
I cannot write for Moms. I wasn’t raised for it. To me, an embrace is a trap. As a child the main plan for my identity is to be a mini-Mom and I just won’t have it. It comes from reading too much. It’s not about worthiness, only about intelligibility. It’s a different ecology but not one I really could explain. Not academic, not religious, not literary, not rez based though rez friendly, not spiritual in the pop way of defining it. I don’t fit with others like me, not that there are many of them anyway. I have more readers by blogging than I would ever have with a book.
Kingsolver has done well with her books. The newest one is called “Unsheltered.” Sounds like she knows those “moms” are up against economic and vocational collapse without any way to know what to do — and they’re in standard America, not some refugee camp in Africa.
“Unsheltered is the compulsively readable story of two families, in two centuries, who live at the corner of Sixth and Plum in Vineland, New Jersey, navigating what seems to be the end of the world as they know it. With history as their tantalizing canvas, these characters paint a startlingly relevant portrait of life in precarious times when the foundations of the past have failed to prepare us for the future.” (http://www.kingsolver.com/books/unsheltered.html)
