This was an odd moment for me to finally get around to reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer, which has been waiting on my bookshelf for ages. Bursting with energy and appreciation for all living things, the book reminds me that I am not a farmer, that I am not a naturalist––not in the true sense of those words, anyway. It offers a snapshot of my former ambitions that, for whatever reason, did not motivate or entice me in the way I thought they might. Even so, I had no trouble enjoying the scenery while traipsing through this smart and artful novel.
Kingsolver, one of America’s finest contemporary authors, has never quite managed to knock my socks off, but her books always impress me and make me think about myself and the world in valuable ways. Prodigal Summer, which takes place in rural Appalachia and is comprised of three overlapping narratives, is no exception. First we meet Deanna, a highly-educated Forest Service employee who has spent the last couple years living alone in the woods. Deanna loves ecology and is a generally disdainful of humanity’s tendency to disrupt and destroy the natural world. Our second protagonist is Lusa, a city girl who finds herself unexpectedly widowed and suddenly in charge of her late husband’s farm, with his entire extended family looking anxiously on. Finally, there’s Garnett, a grumpy, conservative septuagenarian who spends his days trying to resurrect the American chestnut tree and arguing with his saucy neighbor. Predictably, these three storylines start out as discrete threads, but become increasingly interwoven as the novel progresses.
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At its core, Prodigal Summer is about one thing, and one thing only: sex. I’ve never read a text so unabashedly brimming with sexual imagery and sensuous excess. There’s nothing lurid or depraved about Kingsolver’s exploration of this theme; on the contrary, this novel is an empowering and poetic paean to the glory of sexual reproduction. As the title suggests, the story unfolds over the course of a single summer, a “season of extravagant procreation” in which “the collisions of strangers” generate new and intoxicating mixtures of emotions, ideas, and –– of course –– genes. “There was no engine on earth,” Kingsolver writes, “whose power compared with the want of one body for another”. Sex, she teaches us, makes an incomparable contribution to evolutionary robustness, even as it also creates a landscape of genetic diversity in which some individuals are dealt a losing hand: There’s nothing so important as having variety. That’s how life can still go on when the world changes. Variety means strong and not so strong, and that’s just how it is. You throw the dice…It’s the greatest invention life ever made.
As Kingsolver fans will expect, Prodigal Summer also includes long discussions about whether humans are somehow separate from nature or an intrinsic part of it, as well as politically-tinged debates about the economics of farming, the dangers of pesticides, and the ethics of hunting. Some of these are tiresome and don’t feel as fresh as they probably did when the book was published two decades ago; I personally am less sympathetic to Kingsolver’s point of view than I would have been as a younger man. There’s a fair amount of appealing to nature going on here, but not so much than it ruined the book for me. In particular, Garnett represents a nice attempt to get inside the perspective of someone from a previous generation who balks at the newfangled methods of “the damned hippies” who see nature as inherently harmonious. He’s a bit of a stereotype, but also a vivid and strong character in his own right.
Despite my resistance to some features of the worldview presented here, I’m still on board with Kingsolver’s general goal, which is to stubbornly contextualize human activities and aspirations within the diverse dance of earthly life and the greater cosmos that contains it. Humility is called for, early and often. Death is nearby, and not worth lamenting more than is necessary to confront and process our grief. Birth and rebirth are always imminent. I’ll let her have the last word: Solitude is a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot, a tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate and predator to prey, a beginning or an end.
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