“Prodigal Summer” tells three interwoven tales, all love stories of a sort, all set on or around Zebulon Mountain in southern Appalachia and all attacking the arrogance with which mankind presides at the top of the food chain. A strident forest ranger named Deanna Wolfe falls for a hunky young hunter she suspects is only using her to track and kill her beloved coyotes. Two elderly neighbors–an organic grower named Nannie Rawley and a grumpy old man named Garnett Walker–bicker about pesticides. And, in the most resonant strand here, a frazzled twentysomething widow named Lusa Maluf Landowski tries to make a go of her farm after her husband’s truck jackknifes. Lusa thinks it’s morally wrong to grow tobacco. “Half the world’s starving… [W]e’re sitting on some of the richest dirt on this planet, and I’m going to grow drugs instead of food?” Lusa’s in-laws distrust her–they think she’s an uppity city girl, and they resent the fact that she now owns their family’s homestead. When she asks them if anything but tobacco will clear a profit, they scoff at her: “Mary-jay-wanna.”
“Prodigal Summer” doesn’t have the urgency of “Poisonwood,” or anywhere near as many flashes of inspired, ecstatic prose. There’s no way around that. Still, it’s a warm, intricately constructed book shot through with an extraordinary amount of insight and information about the wonders of the visible world–the secret lives of coyotes, the flight of moths and on and on. Kingsolver has a master’s degree in biology and ecology, and, according to her Web site, kingsolver.com, she worked as an archeologist, X-ray technician, biological researcher and science writer before debuting with “The Bean Trees” in 1988. You can tell. “Prodigal Summer” is clearly the product of lifelong fascinations and of a deeply held world view. Human beings are just one species among many here–mating, traveling alone or in packs and always fighting for territory.
Kingsolver’s novel is rife with ecological debates, and the fierce-minded female characters always stand in for the author. Deanna, for instance, heatedly tells her lover that if he and his buddies keep killing coyotes there will actually be more coyotes because they reproduce faster when under siege. (Kingsolver ran across the argument in an Audubon magazine cover story that ran last year. It’s worth checking out the original piece to see how a novelist finds inspiration and then transmutes fact into fiction.) Reading Kingsolver’s new novel, I eventually got sick of the fact that the women were almost always smart and right while the men were almost always stupid and wrong, but I recognize that many of her readers will regard this as–what’s the word?–realism. In any case, the ending of the novel is so suddenly and unexpectedly touching that it’d be churlish to gripe. The elderly neighbors stop fighting and start flirting. And Lusa finds a surprising comfort in her in-laws, who used to disapprove of everything about her: her ethnic name, her politics, her science, her cooking. If in-laws can get along, surely there’s hope for man and beast.
Prodigal SummerBarbara Kingsolver (HarperCollins) 444 pages. $26
