Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

The best way to introduce you to young Demon Copperhead is to let him announce his entrance:

First, I got myself born. A decent crowd was on hand to watch, and they’ve always given me that much: the worst of the job was up to me, my mother being let’s just say out of it.

On any other day they’d have seen her outside on the deck of her trailer home, good neighbors taking notice, pestering the tit of trouble as they will. All through the dog-breath air of late summer and fall, cast an eye up the mountain and there she’d be, little bleach-blond smoking her Pall Malls, hanging on that railing like she’s captain of her ship up there and now might be the hour it’s going down. This is an eighteen-year-old girl we’re discussing, all on her own and as pregnant as it gets. The day she failed to show, it fell to Nance Peggot to go bang on the door, barge inside, and find her passed out on the bathroom floor with her junk all over the place and me already coming out. A slick fish-colored hostage picking up grit from the vinyl, worming and shoving around because I’m still inside the sack that babies float in, pre-real-life

Mr. Peggot was outside idling his truck, headed for evening service, probably thinking about how much of his life he’d spent waiting on women. His wife would have told him the Jesusing could hold on a minute, first she needed to see if the little pregnant gal had got herself liquored up again. Mrs. Peggot being a lady that doesn’t beat around the bushes and if need be, will tell Christ Jesus to sit tight and keep his pretty hair on. She came back out yelling for him to call 911 because a poor child is in the bathroom trying to punch himself out of a bag.

Here is Barbara Kingsolver showing her genius again, managing to take on the voice of a young boy and keeping that voice with all its grammatical blunders and peculiar wording for seven hundred pages of monologue. I can imagine writing a short story in the voice of my younger self, but to be able to convincingly hold that voice not just for a short story but for a very long novel simply astounds me.

There is no way I could do justice to sketching out the whole story of Demon’s life, but I could easily assemble a series of terse bits of advice he gives to the reader. Although it says his name is Damon Fields on his birth certificate. “Did she think she’d even get me off her tits before people turned that into Demon?” And once he got his copper-wire hair, he became Demon Copperhead.

Like Dickens’ David Copperfield, Demon is passed from foster home to foster home and works dangerous, low-paying jobs from the age of eight on. His mother loses custody and regains it several times, but takes in stray men one after another. The worst of these men, Stoner, beats on both him and his mother until Demon is taken from her by Children’s Services. “At the time, I thought my life couldn’t get any worse. Here’s some advice: Don’t ever think that.”

Demon’s great talent is drawing, and he loves to draw super-heroes. He draws his friends and tells them what super powers they have.

While he is with one family, the McCobbs, Mrs. McCobb takes him to Walmart and using money he has made sorting junk for a junk-dealer, she buys him new clothes, not so much for him but to protect her family’s good name.

But at school the next day in my new clothes I still felt horrible. Not even proud. Embarrassed honestly, because nothing would change. Now they’d all think I was just that much more pitiful, because of trying. Loser is a cliff. Once you’ve gone over, you’re over.

At one point, in desperation he seeks out his grandmother, hoping to be taken in and cared for.

My grandmother had no use for anything in the line of boys or men, “Any of them that stands up to make water,” was how she put it. Bad news for me.

Still, his grandmother, his father’s mother, does provide for him and an uncle who lives with her encourages his art and provides sage advice when others only laugh at or curse him.

While Demon’s life is sad and his very existence precarious, this novel is often humorous and Kingsolver’s wisdom shines through. She exposes the many stereotypes applied to hill country miners, so-called hillbillies, and looks long and hard at opiate addiction. In her afterward, she acknowledges her debt to Charles Dickens:

I’m grateful to Charles Dickens for writing David Copperfield, his impassioned critique of institutional poverty and its damaging effects on children in his society. Those problems are still with us. In adapting his novel to my own place and time, working for years with his outrage, inventiveness, and empathy at my elbow, I’ve come to think of him as my genius friend.

Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver

I think Barbara Kingsolver is one of the most important and socially significant authors of the last fifty years. Her latest novel Unsheltered is not a happy read, but it important and very relevant to our times. Kingsolver is a fine scientist as she shows in her essays, High Tide in Tucson as well as in her many novels. Indeed, the science asides in this latest novel are fascinating even when not essential to the plot.

The novel is really two stories, one occurring at the end of the 19^th century, and the other in the present. Iano and Willa have been chasing tenure and job security for almost all of their married lives, and it has so far eluded them.  Their two children, Zeke and Antigony (Tig or Tiger for short) have been forced to live the same itinerant lifestyle as their parents. Zeke, newly out of grad school with massive student debts, has just lost his young wife to cancer, and is suddenly faced not just with that loss, but also with an infant son. Willa and Iano take on the care of the infant and Zeke moves back home. Tig has not quite finished a science degree when she drops out of college and goes to Cuba with her boyfriend. But she, too, without much explanation to her parents shows up on their doorstep, ready to resume her sometimes bitter sibling rivalry with  Zeke. The house they are living in is quickly falling apart and they are told the best route is simply to tear the old structure down and build over the ruins. 

The other story is that of Thatcher Greenwood, his young materialistic wife Rose, Rose’s younger sister Polly and the mother of the two young women, all of whom live in the same house. They, too, are living in a house that is falling apart, and have only Thatcher’s meager income as a high school science teacher to try to shore things up. Both families are very nearly unsheltered with insufficient income to remodel or rebuild. 

Mary Treat is an actual historical figure—an under-recognized biologist and a correspondent of both Charles Darwin and Asa Gray. She is a neighbor of the Greenwoods, and her story is another important strand in the novel. Indeed, I would say that the relationship between Thatcher and Mary is the most intriguing in the book. The New Jersey town that all the characters live in was meant to be a modern utopia, and when established in the 19^th century, it was ruled by a more or less benevolent tyrant by the name of Landis who lures people to the village with promises of free land, and then essentially indentures them as their farms and businesses fail and they must rely on Landis and the company store. The  school where  Thatcher teaches is  ruled by  Landis’ handpicked principal who is self-righteous,  anti-curiosity and anti-science; although the principal has not read Darwin and would not consider doing so, he knows that Darwin must be wrong, since his writings conflict with scripture. 

Although the Thatcher Greenwood story predates the famous Scopes trial by a decade or so, there is a wonderful scene in the book in which Thatcher takes on the principal and the pseudo-science he represents. Thatcher, who is genuinely a champion of reason and empirical evidence, is nevertheless socially inept and shy of confrontation. Mary Treat and his sister-in-law, Polly, take it on themselves to school Thatcher on the methods he must use in the debate. Kingsolver shows off her own understanding of the history of science as she describes this debate. Mary is certainly the character most like Kingsolver in the book.

A reader friend of mine whose opinion I greatly respect, has complained to me that the characters in the novel are not filled out well and not particularly convincing. I understand his  position, but I found most of the characters both well drawn and convincing. In fact, one of the reasons I have been vigorously recommending this novel to women friends is that I find the descriptions of the conflicts between Willa and Tig so convincing. Tig accuses Willa of sacrificing her children’s welfare to the continued and unsuccessful chasing of tenure and job-security, moving them from town to town, each time uprooting them and thus interrupting their own growth and social happiness. 

I saw you and Dad doing that, hitching your wagon to the tenure star, and it didn’t look that great to me. You made such a big deal about security that sacrificed giving us any long-term, community.

The accusations Tig throws at Willa, and her uncompromising attacks on her parenting are so like the mother-daughter relationships of two of my closest women friends. I felt the hurt and heartsoreness of Willa so totally.

There are many other features of this book that I haven’t the time to mention. Tig paints for the reader a fascinating picture of Cuba and of attempts there to reuse and recycle. I also very much enjoyed Kingsolver’s obvious jibes at Trump, although she doesn’t call him out by name, referring to him only as The Blowhard or The Mouth, but there is no doubt to whom she is referring. “I suppose it is in our nature, she said finally. “When men fear the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore the old order.”

While I personally see the importance of this book as primarily social commentary and championing scientific objectivity, I think it is quite worthwhile simply as an engaging story. I count it as one of the best books of 2018.

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

Try to imagine what might have happened, how history might have rolled out, had Lenin not had a stroke at just the moment when Trotsky was on a train taking him to a resort for a much needed short vacation. Trotsky, a champion of democratic socialism, was next in line to succeed Lenin. Suppose he had not believed Stalin’s lie that there was no need for him to return immediately, since only a small, private service would occur to be followed weeks later by a huge state funeral. Imagine Stalin seizing on the accident of Trotsky’s absence from the state service, which in fact did occur almost immediately, to condemn him as at best disloyal, and at worst treasonous. Trotsky then declared an enemy of the state, a counter-revolutionary, and the ruthless Stalin assuming the mantel of power, liquidating any who dissented and setting the USSR on a course of rigidly centralized government. Suppose it had been otherwise.

In her incredibly ambitious novel, The Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver posits the above question as one among many themes. She also takes on McCarthyism, the possibility of getting anything like truth from the press, the political responsibilities of the artist, the love life of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, the devastation of World War II, the tyranny of the F.B.I. under J. Edgar Hoover, and the Mayan and Aztec empires of Mexico. 

I am a great admirer of Kingsolver; I have read almost all of her fiction and much of her non-fiction. I admire the way she weaves her love of biology and environmental issues into her works, her staunch support of feminist issues, her insistence that art is and must be political. That said, I think this particular book suffers from trying to do too much. A skillful editor may have convinced her to cut the sprawling five hundred page novel in half, or better yet, to make it into a series of books—perhaps one about the ancient history of Mexico, another about the relationship between Kahlo, Rivera, and Trotsky, and yet another about the perils of being an artist during the McCarthy era in the U.S. Trying to combine them all into one book obscures her message about the necessity of constantly viewing the present in historical context and, in my opinion, creates a morass stitched together by Kingsolver’s own broad interests rather than by an internal, organic unity. 

Kingsolver is certainly right to remind us that we are too quick to forget the past, too gullible in our trust of the press, too ready to turn a blind eye to the political oppression that has occurred in our recent past and which continues to occur now. However, a colleague of mine and I who decided to read this book together because of our admiration of Kingsolver found ourselves asking why she wrote the book at all, or, at least, why she tried to combine all of these different themes into a single book. There is no doubt that she had a keen interest in Trotsky and the ruthless way in which he was hunted down and killed in Mexico. Her research into the lives of Trotsky, Frida Kahlo, and Diego Rivera is impressive, as is her knowledge of Mayan and Aztec cultures. Her descriptions of what it must have been like for artists who suffered through the McCarthy witch-hunts is both harrowing and convincing. 

The spokesperson in this novel, Harrison Shepherd, is a young man who straddles two cultures—born in the U.S. of a Mexican mother and American father, but raised for most of his young life in Mexico. He returns to this country after the death of Trotsky, settles into a small town in North Carolina and becomes a well known author who writes epics about the ancient Mayan and Aztec civilizations of Mexico. Kingsolver uses the device of yet another narrator, Violet Brown, secretary to Sheperd, to give the reader another view of both the writer and the events that shape his life in the U.S.

Perhaps Kingsolver gives us a clue as to why she wrote this book in a conversation that occurs between Shepherd and Violet Brown.

“I have been wondering what your novel will be about,” she said. “Apart from the setting.” 

“I wonder too. I think I want to write about the end of things. How civilizations fall, and what leads up to that. How we’re connected to everything in the past."  

To my shock she said, “Oh, I wouldn’t.” 

“I think the readers won’t like it. We don’t like to see ourselves joined hard to the past. We’d as soon take the scissors and cut every ribbon of that." 

“Then I am sunk. All I ever write about is history.”

“People in gold arm bracelets, though. Nothing that would happen to our own kind. That’s how I reckon people take to it so well.”

“Oh. Then you think it wouldn’t go so well if I set my stories, let’s say, in a concentration camp in Texas or Georgia. One of those places where we sent our citizen Japs and Germans during the war.”

She looked stricken. “No, sir, we would not like to read that. Not even about the other Japanese sinking ships and bombing our coast. That’s over, and we’d just as soon be shed of it.”

“You’d do that? Take scissors and cut off your past?”

“I did already. My family would tell you I went to the town and got above my raisings.”

“Like I said. The magazines tell us we’re special, not like the ones that birthed us. Brand-new. They paint a picture of some old-country rube with a shawl on her head, and make you fear you’ll be like that, unless you buy cake mix and a home freezer. 

“But that sounds lonely, walking around without any ancestors.”

“I don’t say it’s good. It’s just how we be. I hate to say it, but that rube in the shawl is my sister, and I don’t want to be her. I can’t help it.”

Kingsolver does not want us to take scissors to our past; she wants to place us squarely in it. Not just the past in this country, but the past of Cortes and the Aztecs and the even more ancient Mayans. The past of Trotsky and Kahlo and Rivera. The ugliness of war and of political repression. I applaud her insistence on historicity. I admire her politics and her mighty gifts of story-telling, and perhaps you as readers will see more clearly than I just why all of these themes had to be gathered together in one sprawling novel. In this case, I can only say I’m glad to be finished and to move on.

Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver

This morning I have the opportunity to talk to you about a truly excellent book by Barbara Kingsolver entitled Prodigal Summer. If you are a reader and somewhere on the left, liberal, progressive side of things, then you know of Kingsolver. She is one of the really important political writers of the last twenty years. I admire her not only because she is an excellent writer, but because she is an overtly political writer. That would be surprising enough if she had a small but devout circle of leftist readers—large enough to tempt even a big corporate publisher into risking the publication of a few thousand, even a few hundred thousand, copies, but it is simply stunning when you realize that her books are huge best sellers, reviewed by even the most stodgy and business oriented periodicals and newspapers. I believe that what she has to say is downright dangerous to corporate capitalism, and if her readers really manage to read beyond the story, allow themselves to hear the deeper and more important message, then they cannot help but move further to the left.

I’m sure that many readers were able to read her earlier work, Poisonwood Bible, and yet see in it only a clever story and a condemnation of religious fundamentalism. At best, to see in that wonderful book a studied examination of ethnocentrism and the arrogance of chosen people religions, without also seeing how clearly she paints the role of America and the CIA in the political assassination of Patrice Lumumba, without seeing how the hunger for cobalt and diamonds and the economic enslavement of a whole continent by the U.S. and other imperial giants denies millions of people not only what is rightfully theirs, but keeps them on a razor’s edge of poverty.

Perhaps many who read Prodigal Summer will see it merely as a kind of animal right’s piece—easy to cheer for coyote pups if your portfolio is sound. But any but the most superficial of readings has to leave the reader with so much more. Here is a person who obviously knows what she is talking about, a biologist and naturalist long before she was a famous author, Kingsolver weaves a wonderful and complex story about the interconnections between the senseless slaying of predators, the criminal pressure and lying of chemical companies selling their ever more deadly insecticides, the corporate takeover of farming, and the rapid disappearance of farm families and a whole way of life. Knowing what she knows, seeing clearly just how rapidly forests are disappearing, how species vital to all living things are going extinct at a spiraling rate almost inconceivable in its acceleration, somehow she remains hopeful, and I admire her as much for her dogged hopefulness as for her knowledge and her expertise.

Were this book simply a doomsday warning, a long and close look by someone who knows much more than we her ordinary readers about how frightening the future is, about the extraordinary cost of productive madness, it would be well worth reading. But it is more than that. There is an energy and hopefulness in Kingsolver that is simply thrilling. I wish that I could say that I am always hopeful, that I can somehow see a future that is less market mad and with some sort of sanity with respect to dwindling resources. I have always respected and admired my friends in the left who work and struggle tirelessly in trying to initiate change and who manage somehow to stave of the pessimism, even cynicism, that seems so clearly to square with the facts. Though I can’t say quite why this is so, I have come away from Prodigal Summer with somewhat more hope. Perhaps it is due simply to the huge audience that Kingsolver now reaches; perhaps this signals some burgeoning consciousness in what seems a blind and paralyzed populace. And while consciousness is certainly not enough, it is at least a necessary condition for any real change.

Even if you are simply a would-be naturalist, someone who, like me, had biology and botany as a first love, there is plenty for you in Prodigal Summer. Though I think we should all try to read more natural science, try to have some more understanding of how we play into the great chain of being, I have to admit that many (even most) science texts are badly written and overly technical for the novice. Kingsolver, as she tells us the interesting story of a few families, manages also to tell us about the incredible lives of moths, the strange habits of male butterflies, the complex language of coyote colonies. If, like me, you are an addict of fiction, a reader who has come to love and even expect skillful word-weaving from what you read, then here is a wonderful way to become more acquainted with nature and with the web of dependencies between all living things. I was hooked from the first page as I was allowed to walk along a trail with a women forest service worker, a hermit who has fled from the world of humans back to a saner and more ordered world of non-human nature. Even the first passage should get you, and if it does, you will be hooked for the whole book.

Her body moved with the frankness that comes from solitary habits. 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 witnessed.

I suppose one danger of reading this book is that one could easily simply increase their disgust, even contempt, for human animals as wonder and awe for other creatures increases. I have to admit that I sometimes found myself wondering how wonderful it would be for the rest of the living organisms on the planet if some quick and sudden plague simply wiped out human beings. Such a catastrophe for humans would, most likely, insure many more thousands of years of life on this earth-garden for most other organisms. Couple that with the realization that continuing on the course we are now on will quite soon make the earth unlivable not only for us but for most other living things, and it is a short step to a kind of enlightened misanthropy. But that is certainly not Kingsolver’s intent. If you get a chance, listen to her interviews since September 11; hear what she has to say about the hatred and fear so many other countries have, not for Americans, but for the bloated and senseless economies like this one that are ravaging the earth. As saddened and sickened as she is by so much that is going on in the world, always you can hear also her pleas for change, her understated but very real hope for a better future.

On so many levels, this is a book that you should read, that you will be so glad that you did read. I swear it will inform about the real bleakness of what is happening on the biological level but without leading to simple despair. If you have heard other reviews by me, you know that I don’t bother to talk about books that I think are bad. There are too many good ones to bother knocking the bad. But one problem with that approach is that it might tend to level the good books and fail to distinguish the great from the merely good. Believe me when I say that this is one that you just must read, and when you have, you will feel privileged to be an animal among animals. Perhaps you will also find yourself renewed and committed to trying to make the future better than the past.

Barbara Kingsolver, Paule Marshall, and Jo Sinclair

Almost always when I talk to you about books, I choose to talk about books that I have read very recently. That had been my plan for today, but as it happens, I have in the past weeks reread three great novels, all written in the past fifty years, and all dealing with racism and its ties to colonialism, economic exploitation, and market economies. As impressed or even more impressed than with earlier readings, I want to recommend these books and authors to you. The three authors are Barbara Kingsolver, Paule Marshall, and Jo Sinclair.

Oddly enough, when I chose these three books for a philosophy in literature course, I did not set out to choose books all of which dealt with racism and economic oppression. I am more or less retired from teaching, so I had reason to believe that I may not get the chance to teach this class again. So, again against my bent for choosing what is recent for me, and about us-here-now, I simply scanned my own book journal to note how or when I had used books in the past. Many books called to me, but three in particular caught my attention. Paule Marshall leaps out to me as a reader not only for her great skill as a writer, but because she understands so well from her own history as an Afro-Barbadian immigrant growing up in Brooklyn how racism is tied to and exacerbated by economic oppression, and how money-power hides behind racism—uses racism as a foil, a screen to obscure what is really happening. The brownstones she speaks of are the brownstones of Brooklyn. The original non-Jewish inhabitants are frightened away by Jewish immigrants who hungered for a home. And subsequently a white flight into the suburbs opened up the brownstones to people of color. The hard-working Barbadians, employed because of the second world war and resulting robust economy, and seeing southern blacks as lazy and without initiative, saved and scrimped, rented out rooms, worked two jobs, whatever it took to buy a brownstone—to buy a piece of prosperity.

And to skip for a moment to Sinclair, this time in Cleveland and a bit later, in the fifties, her main character in The Changelings (and almost certainly modeled on Sinclair’s life) lives in a Jewish neighborhood where in each home and in almost every conversation, the first thing to be mentioned is the feared encroachment of Die Schwartze, the blacks. To rent to one of them, to sell to one of them, they are certain will bring their world crashing down. The value of their hard-fought for houses will plummet; even the schuls will abandon those who are left and go, like their neighbors have, to ‘the heights’. This time, the returning soldiers and growing economy of the fifties has made it monetarily possible for black workers to buy homes, but neighborhoods, especially Jewish ones, unite in their efforts to stop the incursion . Sinclair’s lead character, a twelve year old girl named Vincent, who has already led a neighborhood gang, is one of the changelings in this book. By befriending a black girl her own age, Clara, (who has just witnessed Vincent being stripped and demeaned in front of her previous gang—just to prove that she is a girl and does not belong in the gang, let alone leading it), Vincent begins to see real people with black skin instead of threatening automata. She finds that her parents warnings about them, die Schwartze, are just like the warnings Clara has gotten from her parents about all of them, the other, the whites whom they see as blocking their paths to homes and prosperity.

Barbara Kingslover’s Poisonwood Bible takes up similar themes, but this time from a larger and more global perspective. Kingsolver describes the lives of a family of southern Baptists who have gone to Africa, to the Congo, to save heathen souls. If you have read other of Kingsolver’s novels, you know that she is an astute social and political critic who fully intends to use her novels to do political work. I have to admit that in my first reading of Poisonwood Bible, I saw primarily Kingsolver’s critique of religious fundamentalism, as a comparison of religious righteousness (or self-righteousness) and what is right. And there is no doubt that Kingsolver does intend her book as an attack on the blindness and ethnocentrism of much religious evangelicalism. But deeper and more important that this critique is Kingsolver’s critique of economic imperialism and the ways in which Africans have been exploited and deprived of the riches of their own country. Again, it is young girl characters who act as the whistle blowers, the changelings, this time a family of four girls; each of the four girls as well as the mother are given voices to tell us what they see. And what they see is an Africa that has been ruthlessly divided by foreign invaders. The Belgians, who have for decades been extracting cobalt and diamonds and whatever else they can grasp, are feeling the pressure from the native populations, and are about to retreat—at least in their role as direct governors of the Congo. But the popular election that they sponsor and that brings Patrice Lumumba to power threatens to keep African riches for Africans, a proposition that neither the Belgians nor the Americans much like. Quoting form the novel:

The Belgians and Americans agree, Lumumba is difficult. Altogether too exciting to the Congolese, and disinclined to let White control the board, preferring the counsel and company of Black.

So, with the help of the American CIA, Patrice Lumumba is arrested and eventually murdered, and one of the most ruthless and power-hungry puppets for world capitalism ever invented, Joseph Mobutu, is handed power.

The last of these three novels, Poisonwood Bible, is probably the most important of the three precisely because it understands racism and imperialism globally. Kingsolver never tries to hide and never apologizes for the overtly political nature of her novels. She means to be didactic. However, having said that, she does her ‘teaching’ by telling a wonderful story about this family, about these girls and about some of the dangers of religious fanaticism. As one student in my class put it, in spite of realizing the ambitious themes of the novel, she finds herself finally reading not by chapter or even by paragraph, but sentence by sentence. Kingsolver’s wonderful insights about sexism, about relationships, about love and racism and power occur in the detail of the novel as well as in the grand theme. She is such an important novelist of our times.

I suspect that many of you will not have heard of Jo Sinclair. In spite of writing two very important novels, each well known in its time, she never was able to support herself entirely as a writer. Her real names is Ruth Seid, so why does she choose to write under the name Jo Sinclair? You guessed it. Even as late as the fifties, several of the magazines that she publishes in do not even consider material submitted by women authors. And were it not for The Feminist Press, which literally resurrected Sinclair’s work in 1985 (as it has so many wonderful women writers), this important novel would not be available to us today. This press is also responsible for reissuing Paule Marshall’s novel, tough she has written so much since that we can hope that her later successes would have led to a reassessment of her earlier work.

At any rate, it has been a rewarding though sometimes painful and heart-rending experience to reread these three fine novels. I recommend them to you.

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

I want to talk to you this morning about a remarkable and very important novel by Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible (published just last year; a paperback version will be out in October). This novel is ambitious and overtly political, and in my opinion almost without shortcomings. Overtly political novels are often unjustifiably trashed by critics as propagandistic, meaning that the writer dares to have a political worldview that is not pro-US and pro-capitalist. Let me hasten to add that there is a lot of political fiction that is not good, primarily because (like art of all kinds) it simply is not well done, not well crafted art. Characters are invented to play parts, represent waxen views; they are pushed around from the sidelines by the author. I think of the hopelessly sentimental and overly optimistic novel by Maxim Gorky, Mother, written to herald the so-called Marxist rebellion in Russia.

I think there are real dangers and difficulties in writing overtly political fiction. Good (not even to say great) fiction demands character development and a genuine story (or dramatic line). Think of the great political writer Nadine Gordimer. Her characters are utterly intriguing (remember, for example, A Sport of Nature), and the story literally pulls one along, though who could doubt that they are reading about South African economic policy, about economic exploitation, about the economic price of racism and sexism, about imperialism of the worst kind. Sartre, and other left-existentialist writers did less well, but again primarily because the plays and novels are not, in the end, great art.

As an aside here, I think Simone de Beauvoir is right in her novel The Mandarins to insist that all art is political. Written as an account of a group of artist-intellectuals in Paris right after the end of World War II, the question that comes up over and over as they discuss how to exist, how to be as artists and humans in the world they find themselves in is: Should art be political? Many forms of a purist position come up as these people agonize over the question—the general argument being that politics (even ethical issues) somehow sullies art, compromises it. Art must be for its own sake; any admixture with a message is corrupting. Taken to its extreme, the absurdity of this position is obvious, the emptier the art, the more artful it is.

The group de Beauvoir describes in her novel is quite political, most having been directly involved in the resistance movement, many of them Marxists. They see clearly that ‘pure’ art is not without politics; it bears the politics of the status quo; it merely diverts attention from what needs to be seen. This is just the kind of art Plato feared, using honeyed words to charm and mesmerize. Art can of course be a diversion, but if it is just a diversion, something has gone wrong. The function of art is to show things as they are—to “bring being out of concealment”, to disclose,
to dis-cover. Clearly, sexism, racism, tyranny must be a part of art; art that does not see and register these things is not the better for it.

But, so far I have said almost nothing about Kingsolver’s novel. She wants to tell us Americans, who so desperately need to be told, what is happening now in Africa, in what has been called the Congo—what is now happening, what has happened in the last twenty or thirty years, even what has happened for the last century and more. I admire her courage as an artist for taking this on! Some could see it as audacious that an American woman would take on the task of giving us the story of political oppression in the Congo. But she does it in such a clever and ‘humble’ way. The novel is really the quilted together story of four children, daughters of a super-zealous and selfrighteous missionary father, with four or five interludes of overview narrative from the mother. The eldest daughter, vain and beautiful and blond, is the perfect product of Americana; she never thinks to look beneath the surface of the wants/needs she has, for lipstick and sweatersets and boyfriends. Her incredible ignorance about the world and world politics, and the smug patriotism that accompanies it, is quite a mirror of a huge segment of Americans.

The next two daughters, however, are neither ignorant nor shallow. Both, in their own (and quite different ways) are intent on looking beneath surfaces, in seeing and understanding the incredibly different environment they find themselves in. The story of these two girls is so interesting in itself that one could forget how much Kingsolver is telling us through them. Kingsolver develops these two characters in such clever ways that she invites us into another observation/quandary—seeing the world as it is can lead one to activism; it can also lead to cynicism, even when it is more-or-less the same world seen.

Even the baby-daughter, a five year old, gets her chapters. And even here Kingsolver is able to use the clear-eyed perspective of a child to reveal the world to us, the world of racism, the world of religious blindness.

I haven’t spoken yet of what the book has to say about religion, about evangelism, about finding Christ. But you can imagine that Kingsolver will reveal much of what is dangerous and obfuscating about the other-worldliness of much of religion; and she displays the absurdities, the smug ethnocentricity and selfrighteousness of chosen-people religions. One of the twin daughters, Leah, we witness moving from a position of utter ‘righteousness’, dedication to her father and the brand of southern-Babtist-Christianity that explodes from him, to a rejection of righteousness in favor of what is right, and to a life of political struggle. The other daughter, Ada, sees through both her father and his religion much earlier; precocious, but treated almost as retarded and choosing not to speak, she is the most astute critic from the beginning, the one who most clearly sees things as they are. Though her comprehension often entails not action but despair, a kind of saintly withdrawal from the dirt and jumble of the world.

I don’t want to give away much more of the book than I have, but let me read just one (I think) profound passage. Anatole, an African man who, unlike almost all the rest of the village, befriends this unfortunate family of missionaries tyrannized by the husband-father, cautions Leah at one point not to read events, either catastrophes or fortunate events, as teleological, as god-determined warns her against this dangerous mis-seeing of the world. He puts it finally in these words,

Don’t expect God’s protection in places beyond God’s dominion. It will only make you feel punished. I’m warning you. When things go badly, you will blame yourself.

Having said this much in praise of the novel, I have to add that it has weaknesses. The project is a huge one, and Kingsolver makes the mistake that many novelists make when they try to cover too much time. The first four hundred pages of this long novel cover a period of about a year and a half--all four girls giving us an account of their lives in a small African village. The development of character is strong, the story interesting, the political asides clear and in the flow of the narrative. But Kingsolver, understandably, wants to talk not only about 1960 and the events shaping up in the Congo that led to the election of Patrice Lumumba, she wants to talk about world reaction, the role of the US, of the CIA, in the overthrow and murder of Lumumba. About the western hunger for cobalt and rubber and diamonds that led to creation and support of ruthless puppet governments. And I’m glad she did all of these things. I am one of the ignorant Americans who needs to know a little about history. Still, she tries to tell us in one hundred and fifty pages how the lives of these sisters unfold, and there is a sense that she is trying to wrap things up, finish the stories. Just as I had been immersed and carried by the story in the first four hundred pages, I felt some distance and wanting to get the story over with in the last one hundred and fifty.

How important is this flaw? I don’t know. You read the novel and decide for yourself. This is a novel that you need to read.