Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver
|
Our Price: $1.19 Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of Prodigal Summer
Book Review: One of my favorites
Summary: 5 Stars
I love how this book takes a bunch of different story threads, follows them in a compelling way with great summer symbolism and language, and then manages to tie them together in a subtle, meaningful, non-cheesy way. This is my favorite Barbara Kingsolver book, and actually one of my favorite books of all time.Book Review: Recommended, With Caveats
Summary: 4 Stars
First off, let me preface this by saying that I am not a particular rabid fan of Barbara Kingsolver. I have read a couple of her books, and had mixed feelings about them. I enjoyed The Poisonwood Bible and recommended it to several friends. I found Pigs in Heaven to be unbearably preachy and didactic, attempting to take on extremely complicated issues via some almost obstinately flat characters. This book was recommended to me by several people, including my own mother, whose literary taste i usually share--i recommend it, but with caveats. It takes place in Zebulon County (particularly in the forestland up on Zebulon Mountain and the townships and farms beneath in Zebulon Valley). I'm still not quite sure if Kingsolver pins down exactly where in "Southern Appalachia" it's supposed to be set, but based on the geographical references--one character is from the "big city" of Lexington, KY, and another refers to the close proximity of Knoxville and Johnson City, TN--I assume its the mountains along the eastern KY/TN border.
It follows three basic storylines.
The first is that of Deanna Wolfe, a forest ranger living in solitude on Zebulon Mountain, observing the wildlife, keeping the hiking and hunting trails clear, occasionally confronting hunters off-season. She comes across a wanderer named Eddie Bondo, whom she determines is hunting a coyote family she's been studying; of course, she's been all dried up alone and unlaid on a mountaintop so long she can't decide whether to hate him or screw him, or both. I liked her development as a character over the course but found her "relationship" with Mr. Bondo (who seemed to be pretty flat, to me) to be dubious at best.
The second is that of Lusa Landowski, an entomologist (bug scientist) from Lexington of mixed-culture parentage (Polish Jewish father and Palestinian mother) who moved to Zebulon Valley when she marries local farmer Cole Widener. At the start of the book she finds herself widowed, trying to eke out a living on the Widener family farm, and faced with an array of awkwardness and outright hostility from her husband's family.
The third involves a sort of minor feud between elderly farmers whose property lines abut, an eccentric organic orchard tender named Nannie Rawley and a pesticide-loving former 4H teacher and chestnut crossbreeder, Garnett Walker.
By the end of the book, Kingsolver has drawn you some beautiful pictures of the land, what makes it wonderful and what makes it sad. She's portrayed the quirks of these people, transcribed the lilt and meter of mountain speech, aptly set down succinct plain-folks colloquialisms, and she's shown you how the three seemingly entirely different stories are in fact interwoven threads of lives that cross and recross one another in the weave of the Zebulon Valley tapestry. For this, i loved this book.
I wasn't so keen, however, on how strictly drawn the "rights" and "wrongs" were. There is a very strong ecological agenda in this book (and, let me say that i myself am "in Kingsolver's camp" about it; i do agree with her position on revitalizing mountain ecology), and Kingsolver pretty much cracks the reader in the jaw with her position. The insufferable, closed-minded, and/or pompous characters make the ecologically "transgressive" choices, and they have to be patiently taught right-thinking by the independent, free-thinking, hippie-treehugging characters. Now, again, I'm somewhat of a hippie treehugger myself, and the characters aren't entirely black and white, two dimensional cartoons--I just felt that perhaps the conflicts on an ecological level could have had a bit more depth. I found myself wanting to know more about *why* the characters who were portrayed as doing "the wrong thing" had chosen to do so, since they didn't seem stupid and in need of hand-holding to me, and i wanted more of a justification on their behalves than just "they're obstinate, uneducated, and/or misled." It's unfortunate, because had she successfully woven this ecological thread into the book, i'd have called it perfect.
I did think the book benefitted from Kingsolver's background as a biologist; details about the behavioral patterns of the wildlife and plant life, coyote family structure, insect control via predation, extinction of breeds like the American chestnut and the ways in which people live in harmony or conflict with the land definitely broadened the scope of the novel and made it more interesting. Read this book for these things--the word-drawn postcards from the mountains, the nuances of interrelationships among mountain families and "outsiders", sounds and smells and troubles and lives. It is worth it, IMO, despite the ham-handed, preachy treatment of ecology.
Book Review: Lovely language, but...
Summary: 3 Stars
I recently listened to this book on tape over one weekend. As it happens, my son is reading The Bean Trees in high school. As much as I love Kingsolver's prose, by the end of this book I was left with a feeling of uneasiness. The novel feels quite didactic. In particular, the male characters aren't well developed. Deanna's lover seems to exist mostly as a cardboard figure to enable Deanna (or Kingsolver) to lecture on the environment, and of course, ... I think some judicious editing could have stengthened and tightened the novel. In contrast, The Bean Trees seems to have stood the test of time quite well, and I'm enjoying reading it aloud with my son. In part, I think, it's because there Kingsolver shows us characters developing and changing, whereas in Prodigal Summer she does an awful lot of telling.Book Review: The Endless Summer
Summary: 2 Stars
Barbara Kingsolvers books have been a huge commercial success, and many people will read anything she puts out simply because its by her. Before you pick up this book, though, be aware that she has crystallized into a woman on a mission.In the belief that liberal issues of social and environmental injustice should have a commanding place in serious literary fiction, Kingsolver recently dreamed up The Bellwether Prize for Fiction to recognize her concept of socially responsible literature. To rise to this level, it isnt enough to lay out the facts and trust readers to draw the right conclusions. The writer has to spell out the right conclusions.
Against this background, Kingsolver gives us Prodigal Summer, a book that takes aim at some trends affecting earths ecosystem. Its three central themes are the value of predators in a naturally balanced world, the evils of pesticides, and the hardships of small farmers. Along the way, she provides considerable narrative about the natural world. Some reviewers enjoyed reading about nature, and to the extent Kingsolver has reminded them that the natural world exists, the book has that merit.
The book takes place in a small patch of Kentucky or Tennessee in the Appalachian Mountain Range, and story lines rotate, over the course of one spring and summer, among the lives of three groups of people.
First is Deanna, a 47-year-old biologist who, having come to hate the demands of people and the clamor of civilization, sought refuge in a hermitlike existence as a Forest Service caretaker of Zebulon Mountain. While tracking a group of coyotes that had migrated to her mountain, she encounters a 28-year-old muscular guy named Eddie (Kingsolver seems to like muscular men). It is spring, and the world is alive to its cycle of rebirth. The two have a physical attraction for each other that quickly, and often, finds expression.
Next is Lusa, a pretty, young woman of Palestinian and Jewish heritage, and another biologist. She had come to the little valley abutting the mountain after a whirlwind romance. Within a year of her marriage, though, she finds herself a widow in ownership of a small farm, confronting four seemingly hostile sisters-in-law, and the question of whether she should leave, or stay and try to do something with the farm herself.
Last there is a couple in their seventies. Nannie Rawley, a sprightly, unconventional, liberal, and knowledgeable old gal, grows fabulous organic apples in her orchard and vociferously opposes the use of pesticides. Her neighbor, Garnett Walker, is a retired vocational agriculture teacher, a breeder of hybrid chestnut trees, and, strangely, a creationist. Nannie is an everlasting thorn in his side.
Despite the wealth of material available here, Prodigal Summer falls oddly flat. It doesnt meet Kingsolvers own standards for The Bellwether Prize because it cannot be considered literature, or even what is called today serious fiction. Missing are those key elements of compositional excellence and literary aesthetic.
The plot is exceedingly thin. Although Nannie and Garnett provide the nexus for these tales (Nannie has a link to Deanna, and Garnett to Lusa and her family), the connections are so muted as to be insignificant. Indeed, the three stories each too scrawny to stand alone dont advance toward to a common end and never mesh together into a coherent whole.
The Nannie-Garnett section is primarily a platform for Nannie (Kingsolver) to wag her finger at Garnett (us readers) and to lecture on and on about pesticides and little critters. A real case can be made for organic farming, but Kingsolvers puny arguments and her strident tone defeat that result. Casting poor Garnett as a doddering buffoon, hobbled by old-age infirmities and "backward" beliefs, may make him an easy target for Nannie, but it doesnt help Kingsolvers case. Since when is tolerance relative? It is simply not nice to ridicule someones condition or religious beliefs.
What the Deanna section lacks in storyline, it makes up for in long-windedness. Deanna inexplicably sheds her desire to be rid of people in her life, and she and Eddie have sex, sex, sex. Their relationship, though, has no emotion, no spark. As Deanna ostensibly wrote her masters thesis on coyotes, this section could have been rich with observations of these animals behavior in the wild, but all we get are Deannas blanket lectures. It is here that Kingsolver writes most extensively about the natural world. While her narrative is occasionally lovely, much of the time she is so painfully repetitive, and so much the harpy, that the reading is hard going. She drones on, oblivious to the beauty, the excitement, and the magic of the eastern woodlands. Youd be better off reading Rachel Carsons lyrical (and short) book, The Sense of Wonder.
At least the Lusa section has the semblance of a plot, and the dialogue here is often quite fine. Regrettably, Lusa herself is an implausible character (this transplanted city girl is all of a sudden a prodigious gardener, a whiz at canning, and a better baker than her sisters-in-laws mother?). Dramatic opportunities sail by, unexplored. And her brainstorm for paying the farms expenses struck me as preposterous.
I opened Prodigal Summer in happy expectation: I agree with her central tenets, and I love the area in which the book is set. Alas, I found sanctimonious female characters who give new meaning to the word annoying. I found science that is watery and sometimes suspect. And I found writing so tedious, so rambling, and so lacking in plot or drama that it took me weeks to finish the thing. All in all, this book struck me as a lazy work, where the basic elements of fiction have been abandoned in favor of feeble ideological bleating.
1 2