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 Hiding Place by Trezza Azzopardi

I want to talk to you this morning about yet another amazing debut novel. This one, by Trezza Azzopardi, is entitled The Hiding Place. I’m one of those fools who very often does judge a book by its cover and who buys because of flashy titles or irresistible jacket covers. Of course, I also take a quick look at the back to see who has reviewed the book and at least a bit of what they have said without risking the story-line. I am also almost irresistably drawn to what are called coming of age novels, although the truth is that many such novels are pretty bleak and almost unremittingly sad. All of the above is true of The Hiding Place; it had an irresistible cover and enough information on the front and back to convince me that the story would be an important one.

One reviewer says of the characters in the book that they are drawn so sharply that they bite. Just so. This is the story of a family of five girls, their desperate mother and their almost casually cruel and self-absorbed father. The entire story is told through the eyes of the youngest girl, Dolores, Dol for short. It begins a bit unconvincingly, since Dol is only about two years old, and yet telling us the story of her family as if she remembers it quite clearly. However, the patient reader will find out soon enough that this is a kind of collage, quite obviously put together by a much older Dol who is looking back, trying somehow to make sense of an impoverished and brutal childhood.

The story is about Maltese immigrants in Wales living in a section of town that is crumbling, half deserted. We know very little of either the mother or father except by way of reports from Dol, and her view is a kaleidoscopic one dancing from daughter to daughter. The girls range in age from the very young Dol to pretty girls in their early teens. What we do know about the father, Frankie, is that he cares for little other than gambling, and his constant dream is one of escape—escape back to Malta (now a romantic dream in his mind), or at least back to the sea and a life without children, without obligations. Such seems to be the dream of many of the poor Maltese men, while the dreams of the women who bear their children are simply of enough food to put on the table and of children who may someday be able to carve out lives not so desperately determined by the day to day struggle for food and shelter.

Frankie is worse than a non-provider; he manages to lose whatever he has earned, and too often to lose as well the meager scraps that his wife has managed to scrape together and to hide away for rent or food for the next day or two. No wonder the mother, Mary, is on the edge of sanity. The children are regarded by the locals as half-breeds, but despite their extreme poverty, at least some of the girls are pretty, and Frankie manages to gamble away even his daughters. The oldest he literally sells to another Maltese immigrant who has been luckier (and more ruthless) than he. He is able to excuse that transaction by believing that the man he sells his daughter to is really the girl’s father, thus he can punish his wife while buying himself out of his gambling debts. The next oldest daughter, Celesta, is desired by a man three times her age, and again Frankie rather casually arranges a marriage, and if it sickens him do to so, it is more because he resents adding to the possessions of the old man than out of real concern for his daughter.

Although we, as readers, do not see a great deal of the violence Frankie rains down on his wife and daughters, it is obvious enough that he rules by threats and physical force. In one instance we know that Mary, the wife, is in an upstairs bedroom, so battered that Frankie has had to call in the doctor.

My father shoots his eyes at me—terrible, warning looks that make me want to hide away—as if he’s guessed what I’m thinking about. He’s nervous about the doctor coming; he thinks he’ll be found out. I won’t tell—none of us will, not even Fran.

Fran, who is about ten, is about to be sent to a Home, because her reaction to her chaotic home life and the veil of violence hanging over it is to take some sort of control over her world, so uncontrollable at home. She finds her measure of control by burning down the abandoned buildings in her neighborhood.

I find myself telling you too much of the story, because I don’t know how else to describe or recommend to you this novel. Perhaps I am warning you at the same time that I recommend this book to you. In many ways, the experience of reading this novel is horrible. In fact one of my most trusted reader friends passed the book along to me because she simply had no desire to go on reading it. Her words, “I don’t like the father; I can’t quite believe the story. It’s sad and awful and I don’t know why I’m reading it.” Of course, we are not supposed to like the father and the lives of the girls and the mother are just what they seem to be, unbearable. So why write the book and why should we read it? I’m not sure I can answer either question convincingly. My deep sense is that the book was written as autobiography or very, very closely witnessed lives. Poverty and violence next of kin; poverty and madness are often intertwined; poverty and unhappiness are constant companions. We already know all of these things. Do we need to be reminded again? Yes, and especially if the person telling us has the skill and insight of Azzopardi.

This wonderful/awful little book never preaches; it simply describes, using time-warp as a tool for showing us whole lives while still restricting almost all of the told story to a few months, at most a year or two. Only at the very end do we get some clues as to how these emotionally and physically battered children turn out. And if there is any part of the book that seems a bit too neat, a bit out of synch, it is this last section. I suspect the author had to include this last part as her own way of making sense of what came before.

So, on a day when my friends in the Old Mole collective are talking of visions of the future, I am reviewing this bleak tale of the present and past. My only excuse is that I want always to talk to you of what I am reading now. I could have talked today of Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, or of some other moderately hopeful view of the future. Instead, I have chosen to talk of this sad tale. I have to leave it to you as a reader to decide whether insights gained from reading it sufficiently compensate for the sadness of the story. Read it when you feel strong and when you can give it the concentrated reading it needs and deserves.