Book Report- Prodigal Summer
Prodigal Summer
Barbara Kingsolver
HarperCollins Books, 2000
Prodigal Summer is one of the most stunning books I have read in a long time. It wasn't even recommended to me, I picked it up off the desk of a friend in a moment of boredom and didn't put it down for days until I was finished.
Tender, kind, sad, truth-telling and powerful, this book touched me in ways I cannot speak of. It had the quiet voice of someone who knows tragedy, understands the link of death and life, human and nature, and the power of each individual, wether human, insect or animal, to transform and live on despite it.
The discussion of the human's place in the role of things was complete, well balanced and beautiful. Environmental while being realistic, fully discussing human beings in the place of nature, either as its masters or slaves. Dealing with huge issues such as these while making them irrelevant and relevant in the place of things, Barbara Kingsolver has the capacity to deal with the intensity of life with a mix subtlety and hardedge that it deserves. It is truly rare to find a book that so powerfully speaks the conflict of life as it is.
The book breaks into the stories of three individuals, all who are linked without knowing it, all who are going through understanding their place in the world in the midst of major life changes; age, death, birth and the subtle shifting that just comes from being alive.
Predator
"Solitude is a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to a beetle underfoot, a tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate to predator to prey, a beginning or an end. Every choice is a world made new for the chosen."
Pg 444
Our novel begins with the story of Deanna, a woman who has chosen the solitary life of a forest services officer, living alone in a cabin on a mountain. Her job is to watch. See the forest for what it is, track the animals, notice the cycle of life and death, and report to those who do not inhabit the mountain. She is a part of everything, and yet so very separate. She has a passion for life the way it is, knowing how and why ecosystems function, and believing in the natural laws of death in order to continue life.
Another job that she has is to run off poachers and protect the mountain from the destruction of human beings. However, at the beginning of the story she meets a hunter, and, unlike most humans she dismisses from her space, she has a connection with this one that she cannot ignore.
A mating ritual between them begins, despite their opposing views on the world. Although he ends up coming and going, living at her cabin for most of the summer, they have opposite views on the treatment of the natural space. She, believing in the wisdom of the world if humans just leave it alone, he, believing that humans have the right to kill, change the forces that be, and posses.
The main conflict is over one particular animal, the coyote. The coyotes found on this mountain are characters in and of themselves, and Deanna is awed and kindred with them. The hunter however, born as a sheep farmer, has an irrational hatred of them, and is on the mountain specifically to kill the ones that have moved there.
"Deanna felt the impulse to bolt- to flee this risky mate gleaned from her forest.
A sheep rancher. She knew the hatred of western ranchers toward the coyote; it was famous, maybe the fiercest human-animal vendetta there was... The farmers she had grown up with would sooner kill a coyote than pronounce its name. It was a dread built into humans via centuries of fairy tales: give a man the run of a place, and he will clear of of wolves and bears." Pg 28
Throughout the summer Deanna wrestles with the confusion over her choice of someone and how he could possibly see the world in this way. But her values begin to be questioned when her own world view begins to shift.
While she believes in the right of predator to take a life, she finds it horrible when a human does it, not seeing humans as natural but rather unnatural in their willingness to exterminate. However, there occurs a shift in her own body so great, that when he begins to bring meat home to eat, she finds herself suddenly changing her values around it. Then there is an incident when she questions even nature's right to take a life- a snake has been living in the roof of her cabin eating the mice, which she sees as natural and is grateful for. But there comes a moment when, instead of eating the undesirable, the snake consumes a whole nest of baby birds Deanna has been watching and caring for all summer. The sorrow and confusion she feels over the unjustness of this is a huge turning point in her story.
Photographs by Laura Makabresku
By the time Deanna realizes she is with child, she has come to the balance of what it means to value one life over another. While her mate moves on, she is ready to return to the world of the human, complete in her own shift that she could snuff the life of almost anything to protect her own young.
Moth Love
""Lusa, honey, where you come from maybe they think it's be nice to have a church full of bees. People get sentimental in a place where nature's already been dead for 50 years, so they can all get to mourning it like some relative they never knew. But out here he's alive and kicking and still on his bender."
"My husband, the poet. Nature is an uncle with a drinking problem.
He shook his head. "That's how it is. You have to persuade it two steps back everyday or it will take you over..."
"...Take over what?" she said, trembling to hold back a rage. "You're nature, I'm nature. We shit, we piss, we have babies, we make messes. The world will not end if you let honeysuckle have the side of your barn." Pg 45
The story of Lusa continues the questionings of Deanna flawlessly, completing them in another way and adding breadth to the dialogue.
Lusa is a entomologist who grew up in a city always having the desire to be a farmer. At the end of her doctorate, she meets Cole, a small town farmer who she falls in love with, marries, and moves to his family homestead . She is completely unprepared for this new life she thought she wanted, plopped into the middle of a huge family and the realities of what it means to be a day to day farmer. Viewing her natural world with rose-colored glasses, her and her husband fight constantly about how to tend the land, Lusa getting upset when he kills bugs and weeds that she sees are vital to the ecosystem. To top it all off, his giant family sees her as strange and pretentious, and she becomes desperately unhappy in the space.
About a year after their marriage, as Lusa is seriously considering leaving him, Cole is killed in a truck accident. She is left alone on the giant farm, suddenly faced with the realities of what it means to have debt, tend land and survive.
Trying to learn the skill of farming from scratch, Lusa makes desperate mistakes, topped by a family who would prefer to run her off then help. After she misses the planting of the farms main income earner, tobacco, due to her high and mighty attitude that no one should smoke anyway, she realizes that she may loose the farm altogether and has to face what it means to be practical but inventive.
All this time Lusa is learning more and more tidbits about Cole, things she never knew about his values and desire for the farm. Learning that he had always hated farming tobacco, and had grown up trying to invent new ways of organic farming make her realize just how close their values had been. She begins to level out her unbalanced perspective and see the farm the way that Cole had- allowing herself to cull and kill what needed it, and help what needed to grow. Her garden begins to prosper by finding ways of introducing good bugs to kill the bad, and she finds the money to save the farm through an unexpected thing- goats.
It turns out that an old man had introduced goats as a 4-H project one year, and now there were hundreds of goats in the county that people had no use for. Being of arab decent, and also an outsider, Lusa realizes that goat meat is a huge part of several religious holidays. Seeing the market for them, Lusa takes them off the hands of those in the community, saving the farm and accomplishing her late husbands dream- to make a living off of something other than tobacco.
At the same time the family begins to open up to Lusa, beginning to see her a more competent and intelligent then they realized. Cole's sister Jewel gets cancer, and Lusa suddenly finds in her a kindred that she never knew existed. As Lusa begins to care for Jewel's children, she becomes more and more deeply understanding of the nuances and beliefs of the family. Her entire process is to open up to these ideas while bringing in her own ideas to help round them out to something functional and healthy.
Photographs by Ilya Kisaradov
The motif of the battle with the coyote is brought into Lusa's story as well, once again highlighting the question of when it is appropriate for the human being to take a life.
"After a decent interval, long enough to permit a change of subject, Rickie asked, "You're not worried about that coyote?"
"Am I?" She drank half her glass of tea before answering. "You'll think this is crazy, but no, I'm not. I mean maybe, at the worst, it could get one kid, and that wouldn't break me. I can't see killing a thing that beautiful just on suspicion. I'll go with innocent until proven guilty."
"You may just change your tune when you see it running off into the woods with that poor little kid screaming bloody murder."
"Lusa smiled, struck by his language. "Listen, can I tell you a story? In Palestine, where my people came from, about a million years ago, they had this tradition of sacrificing goats. To God, theoretically, but I think they probably ate them after the ceremony." She set her glass down, twisting it on the grass. "So, here's the thing. They'd always let one goat escape and run off into the desert. The scapegoat. It was supposed to be carrying all their sins and mistakes from that year."
Rickie looked amused. "And the moral of the story is what?"
She laughed. "I'm not sure. What do you think?"
"That's it's OK to let one get away?
"Yeah, something like that. I'm not such a perfect farmer that I can kill a coyote for the one kid it might take from me. There are ten other ways I could loose a goat through my own stupidity. And I'm not about to kill myself. Does that make sense?" Pg 413
Old Chestnuts
"He walked around the closet on Ellen's side of the bed, where he tended to keep things he never planned on needing again. The door had gone off it's frame a little and scraped the floor as he dragged it open. He batted at the darkness like a blind man, trying to find the pull string to switch the light on, and nearly jumped out of his shirt when something big plummeted down off the shelf, bouncing off his shoulder as it fell. Ellen's round old hatbox. It landed on its side, and out rolled Ellen's navy-blue church hat on it's brim, describing the small half-circle on the floor before sitting down flat beside the bed.
"Ellen," he said aloud, staring at the hat.
The hat, of course, made not reply. It merely sat there, flat on its proper little brim, adorned with its little bunch of artificial cherries. If it could've folded its hands in its lap, it would have.
"Don't scare me like that woman. I'm doing the best I can."
He grabbed his shotgun with both hands and hurried out of the bedroom, reaching around behind him to pull the bedroom door shut. She didn't need to see this." Pg 422
The final story of our novel has to do with an elderly man named Garnett. While less fleshed out than the other two stories of this novel, it once again parallels the common themes. Garnett is a man set in his ways, lonely and stagnant since the death of his wife. He has one bane in his life; his neighbour Nannie. Nannie and him share a fence line, as well as sharing the argument that the other characters in the book discuss. Nannie, also a widow, is an elderly organic farmer, who gives grief to Garnett over his use of pesticides, driving him crazy with her nontraditional methods of living and tending to her orchard.
Garnett has only one thing that gives him a little passion, and that is the American Chestnut tree. A blight had wiped out most of the Chestnuts in the area, and humans, in a desperate attempt to claim what valuable wood was left, had done the rest by chopping down the few that remained. Garnett's only focus since the death of his wife had been to try and breed the few American Chestnut splices he had left, with a Japanese strain of the tree which was blight resistant.
Age plays a big part of this story, as Garnett realizes that the possibility of accomplishing this before his own death is slim. Add to that his unconventional neighbour, and Garnett is fraught with worry and confusion.
""Oh no, you're not," she said firmly, looking at him with a menacing eye. "Tell me what's wrong with me. Let's just get it out. All these years you've been picking at me like a scab. What have you really got against me?"
She stood there fearless, darling him to tell the truth, exciting him to actually doing it...
...He said feebly, "You don't act normal for your age."
She stood there with her mouth a little open, as if there were words stuck halfway between her mind and the world around. "There isn't any normal way to act seventy five years old. Do you know why?"
He didn't dare answer. Was she seventy five exactly?
"I'll tell you why," she said. "Considering everything- the whole history of things- people are supposed to be dead and buried at our age. That's normal. Up till just lately, the Civil War or something, they didn't even know about germs. If you got sick, they slapped leeches on you and measured you for a coffin. I wouldn't doubt by anybody made it to fifty...
...what law says I have to cover up for shame of having a body this old? It's a dirty trick of modern times, but here we are. Me with my cranky knees and my old shrivelled ninnies, and you with whatever you've got under there, if it hasn't dropped off yet- we're still human. Why not just give in and live until you die?" Pg 371-373
Throughout this story Garnett goes through the same transformation of the other characters, moving from a hard stance against what seems to be against his world view, into the understanding that balance of viewpoints is necessary to have a healthy life. Through the compassion yet outspokenness of Nannie, Garnett comes to understand that what is different is not necessarily wrong, and that Nannie's approach to nature and people is actually more akin to his own values than the way he approaches life.
The reason why I found this novel so compelling had to do with the rational, yet emotional way it dealt with such relevant environmental and relational issues. It really takes you step by step with the characters through all of their struggles with the process of changing one's mind. It was so beautifully human, and dealt with issues in a way that really made you understand both sides, and then come to middle between them. Combine that with the poetic way Kingsolver uses words, and this novel becomes something that is truly inspirational. It is a book I would more than recommend.
For other books in this vein- It really reminded me of Surfacing by Margaret Atwood, and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard.
Photograph by Ilya Kisaradov