Guardian Review

Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver 482pp, Faber, pounds 17.99 Barbara Kingsolver's fiction has achieved bestselling status in the US with surprisingly ambitious themes, from Native American culture in The Bean Trees and its sequel Pigs in Heaven , through the Nicaraguan war of Animal Dreams , to evangelism and American foreign policy in the Belgian Congo of The Poisonwood Bible . In Prodigal Summer she returns in a sense to her own back yard, although her marvellously subtle and compelling tale of a southern Appalachian farming community in tense interplay with the wilderness on its doorstep contains a deft parable of humankind's place in nature. The novel alternates between three stories whose links gradually emerge, in a tiny community of 600 people where, as one perplexed newcomer remarks: "Everybody within 16 miles of here is uncle or cousin to you someways." From a mountain log cabin, Deanna Wolfe, a 47-year-old biologist with a "hillbilly accent" and a serious education, scours National Forest land for poachers while keeping fond tabs on the coyotes new to her territory. The divorcee's two- year solitude is disturbed by Eddie Bondo, a rifle-toting Wyoming sheep rancher some 20 years her junior, for whom "hating coyotes is my religion", yet who draws her into an irresistible, ambivalent affair. Down in the valley, in Deanna's hometown of Egg Fork, Lusa Landowski, a city-born entomologist and newly widowed, clings to an epiphany of her husband, Cole Widener: she sees their love, carried in the scent of honeysuckle across a field, as akin to the language of moths, which navigate by sense of smell. As Lusa battles with the harsh maths of subsistence farming to rear goats rather than harvest tobacco on her late husband's land, she grows closer to her five seemingly hostile sisters-in-law and their maverick children, while evading the attentions of their menfolk. In the third thread, the elderly Garnett Walker toils to revive the American chestnut tree, made extinct by loggers and fungal blight, while warring with his neighbour, Nannie Rawley. Left in "terror of chemicals" partly by the birth of a Down's syndrome daughter who died young, Nannie enforces a "no-spray zone" around her organic orchard. The three women protagonists have in common their independence - ranging from Deanna's unselfconsciousness to Lusa's faltering self- sufficiency - and an intuitive regard for nature, backed up by superior education. Kingsolver, a former biologist and journalist, has a rare ability to communicate widely what she knows as a scientist, and this novel sounds warnings against hunting predators who compensate by breeding faster, or against pesticides that boost pest populations by killing off the bugs that prey on them. The ecosystem reestablishing itself in the protected forest is seen as a common habitat, not a wilderness to be kept at bay from the farmland. As Deanna says of hunting coyote: "It's not just one death. It's a piece of the world turned upside down." This is a novel that insists on the shared animality of humans, regardless of their efforts to subdue nature. That the world is "a place with its own immutable rules of hunger and satisfaction" is clear in the novel's erotic undertow amid the spring fecundity of lavishly described woodlands, and in the characters' human desires, not only for sex, but to mark their territory, for progeny (the elders grieve at the prospect of growing old "without young ones to treasure coming up after you"), even for food; disavowing any sentimental attachment to fluffy animals, Deanna relishes meat, saying "I know a little too much about animals to try to deny what I am". She is amazed by "the obvious animal facts people refused to know about their kind", such as that women exposed to enough moonlight will ovulate at full moon, or that pheremones announce their periodic fertility to men. Smells, says Lusa, who sniffs her absent husband in strange men's work clothes, are "a whole world of love we don't discuss". In a pointed irony, assiduous sperm get the better of Eddie's impressive array of prophylactics. Although insistence on human biology has been used conservatively, to limit rather than liberate women, Kingsolver's view of nature is no endorsement of the nuclear family. Not only do her women glory in single motherhood, but like the packs of sister coyotes that nurture an alpha female's young, Lusa's sisters-in-law prepare to adopt the children of a sister who has cancer. Nor does the novel deny individuality; the tomboyishness of Lusa's niece, Crystal, is less a sexual imperative than "just her way of trying to be herself". Although Deanna imagines herself close to nature, as she forgets how to converse or read people's faces, the novel stresses human gregariousness and interdependence. "Solitude is a human presumption," it says, "a long process of coming undone from oneself", to which pregnancy and motherhood may be a corrective. While small-town gossip and claustrophobia are evoked through Garnett's back-biting pettiness and sensitivity to imagined slights, the Appalachian "hillbillies" (who pronounce "hell" to rhyme with "hail") are humanised not ridiculed, falling back on each other in hard times. Lusa realises: "You had to be so careful with large families. Who knew how things would turn around, who you'd need in the end?" Or as Nettie notes wisely: "There's always more to a story than a body can see from the fence line." Most of the boundaries delineated in this novel are seen to erode: between wilderness and cultivation, human and animal, society and individual."People just adore fences, but Nature doesn't give a hoot," says Nettie, as barriers among neighbours or family members crumble. But Kingsolver's world perhaps divides too easily into male and female: between the women protectively in tune with nature, and the male hunters and farmers who strive to tame it. The men are simply wrong; they change and are embraced, or stand firm and are rejected. Conviction can tip into righteousness as the fiction rams home a message at the expense of dialogue. Yet the novel is carried by its more tentative truths about human nature, and the subtler revelations of its interior lives, as the characters experience passion, widowhood, menopause, pregnancy, adoption, bereavement. Often funny, and only occasionally teetering into schmaltz with the elderly couple, Prodigal Summer is a rich and compulsive read. Its acute and sensuous observation of the natural world reveals an unexpected beauty, as it traces human love in the flight of a luna moth. To order Prodigal Summer for pounds 14.99 plus 99p p&p, call Guardian Cultureshop on 0800 3166 102. Caption: article-king.1 [Barbara Kingsolver]'s fiction has achieved bestselling status in the US with surprisingly ambitious themes, from Native American culture in The Bean Trees and its sequel Pigs in Heaven , through the Nicaraguan war of Animal Dreams , to evangelism and American foreign policy in the Belgian Congo of The Poisonwood Bible . In Prodigal Summer she returns in a sense to her own back yard, although her marvellously subtle and compelling tale of a southern Appalachian farming community in tense interplay with the wilderness on its doorstep contains a deft parable of humankind's place in nature. The three women protagonists have in common their independence - ranging from [Deanna Wolfe]'s unselfconsciousness to [Lusa Landowski]'s faltering self- sufficiency - and an intuitive regard for nature, backed up by superior education. Kingsolver, a former biologist and journalist, has a rare ability to communicate widely what she knows as a scientist, and this novel sounds warnings against hunting predators who compensate by breeding faster, or against pesticides that boost pest populations by killing off the bugs that prey on them. The ecosystem reestablishing itself in the protected forest is seen as a common habitat, not a wilderness to be kept at bay from the farmland. As Deanna says of hunting coyote: "It's not just one death. It's a piece of the world turned upside down." Although insistence on human biology has been used conservatively, to limit rather than liberate women, Kingsolver's view of nature is no endorsement of the nuclear family. Not only do her women glory in single motherhood, but like the packs of sister coyotes that nurture an alpha female's young, Lusa's sisters-in-law prepare to adopt the children of a sister who has cancer. Nor does the novel deny individuality; the tomboyishness of Lusa's niece, Crystal, is less a sexual imperative than "just her way of trying to be herself". - Maya Jaggi.