I was a bit afraid of returning to the works of Barbara Kingsolver. Although I loved The Poisonwood Bible and The Lacuna, I was dissapointed with Unsheltered. I felt as if there was too much politics there, even if I agreed with the author on many levels. Also, the narration wasn’t as captivating as in the previous novels by Kingsolver.
Recently, I’ve read Flight Behaviour, and, oh… it was so much worth of returning to! This book is just so truthful, rings so true. If you think that Hillbilly Elegy is the only novel on Appalachian society, then you should pick up Flight Behaviour.
Dellarobia, the protagonist, is a twenty-eight-years-old woman who looks after her two children without support of her husband, Cub, and her parents-in-laws. She married Cub in a shot-gun wedding and lost their first child, and now she lives on a crumbling farm of his parents. Bored with her life, she seeks and affair but instead, she finds something else on the hills nearby; flame-coloured butterflies which shouldn’t be there. The appearance of butterflies sets in motion a whole avalanche of events and changes the life of Dellarobia and her relatives.
It is a novel not only about an ecological phenomenon but, above all, about life in a community, and its metaphor of society matches well with its message on climate change and endangered nature. Everything is fragile here; the butterflies, family ties, Dellarobia’s marriage. Everything can change, too, and the question is how to adapt to it. This is what Ovid Byron, a scientist of Carribean origin, tries to discover, having come on Dellarobia’s farm to examine the butterfly phenomenon. Ovid and young students helping them are strangers in Appalachia, people of colour entering an impoverished white community. Neither Dellarobia nor her husband exotize them, though, realizing over weeks that they share more than they’d supposed. It’s an important experience especially for her, so far trapped in the cage of tedious domestic duties. Ovid Byron isn’t a lover in this story, even if he has makings for a one. He’s a friend, a man inspiring the protagonist to look further.
I think that those two show well how Kingsolver writes her characters out of stereotypes. She said once that she writes, among other things, about Appalachians, because there are many preconceptions about this area. Flight Behaviour confronts them deftly. It is true that Dellarobia’s vicinity is impoverished and many people are under-educated there, but it is also explained how neoliberalism and climate change have had their impact there. And people around Dellarobia aren’t aware of this; instead, they are going on with denial, still fantasying about American Dream. It doesn’t mean, though, that the bigger world is any better, as like a denialist journalist who pays a visit to Dellarobia’s farm and changes the meaning of Ovid Byron’s conclusion. And there’s a certain notion of classism too, the awareness that people from big cities don’t understand Americans from small towns and impoverished areas. People feel they are forgotten, neglected, and that’s why they make choices that shock the public. One may say that Hillbilly Elegy has said it already. But to my mind, Flight Behaviour says it better.
And as usual, it isn’t white working-class men who get the worst, but those who may seem unnoticed; women. It’s Dellarobia who does all the tough unpaid job, who looks after her children and help on the farm additionally. It’s her who’s sacrified her dreams and her independence. And it’s her who isn’t heard; until butterflies change everything. Nevertheless, unlike in The Poisonwood Bible, her husband is no villain, and I’m glad to see that this time, Kingsolver created a difficult marriage with subtlety. She created a situation when people are together more out of social convention than out of passionate love, but passionate love isn’t the solution to their problems, either. Maybe the main trouble of Dellarobia and Cub is that they are a couple, but not a pair of friends? That they are bound by their communnity’s stereotypes on gender roles, by the myth of “bread-winner”? In the end, toxic masculinity hurts not only Dellarobia, but Cub too.
In this book, other daily troubles are caught perfectly convincing as well. The reality of trash malls and second-hand shops, the endless dilemma of “who’ll look after my kids”, all this sounds true in Flight Behaviour. We see it with irritation, we see it with helplessness; that still, women are responsible for children almost on their own, and still, many people think it’s natural and don’t see what an important and hard job it is. We also realize how it is mixed with capitalism and consumptionism, and how your independence is about having your own money. It’s been already described in The Poisonwood Bible and in Unsheltered, and in Flight Behaviour, it rings true all the same. Motherhood in those books isn’t all pink-and-roses, but neither it is a destructive force – it is an uneasy hope. The destructive force in Kingsolver’s world is capitalist greed and patriarchy. Even here, though, lines aren’t that simple. A local pastor is a nice guy with kind heart and refreshing ideas, unlike Nathan Price in The Poisonwood Bible. People are climate change-denialists because of many factors, including the helpless efforts of scientists to reach a broader public. Men are stuck in their roles not because they want to humiliate women but because they were brought up so. And people with lower education are just people, not a red-neck stereotype.
This is Barbara Kingsolver I like the most, capable of showing the world in all its complicated facets.
Left Hand of Fiction 