It’s almost incredible, to read another book by an author and to know at once that, yes, it was worth to return to that writer. Barbara Kingsolver is one of them.
Prodigal Summer is, after a way, similar to Flight Behaviour. Here and there, we get a story of unwealthy white people from American South. Here and there, neglecting those areas is criticized. Here and there, there are women who have to change something about their lives.
But Prodigal Summer is more optimistic, and in a way, more panoramic. It tells three stories, actually, of Lusa, a young widow on a farm, of Garnett, an old widower who has an uneasy friendship with his neighbour, and of Deanna, a forrest ranger taking up with a younger guy. Those people are connected by friendship, gossips, and business.
While in Flight Behaviour relations are dissolving, here they are building up. Lusa discovers that the conservative rural family of her husband is nicer than she’d thought. Garnett learns to respect his independent neighbour Nannie who challenges his obsolete creationist views. And Deanna finds a very unexpected hope in her so far solitary life.
They are all broken this way or another, by the trauma of widowhood, or child’s death, or a difficult divorce. They all have different ideas, approaches and opinions, but Kingsolver manages to do justice to the each of them. She makes no stereotypes even if her observation shows how some preconceptions are ingrained in American society; for example, how Lusa is estranged as a Polish Jew-Palestinian among WASP people. But she also lets us to see the daily struggle of such small rural communities, and how they are affected by neoliberalism, climate change, and our own human fears of nature.
Nature is yet another theme of her novels and here, in Prodigal Summer, it is even more visible than in Flight Behaviour. Relations between people and nature are always complicated here. Some are ecologists, some are sceptical towards the idea of protecting nature; because they actually struggle with it as farmers, such as Lusa’s husband. Some want to preserve dying species, such as coyotes and chestnut trees, but they are driven to this idea by very different sets of values, as Deanna and Garnett respectively do. And some love the world around them just as it is, and want it to remain untouched, as Nannie Rawley does. And Kingsolver is able to show that after a way, every of them is right, and every of them seeks life, actually, seeks the strength of it in the nature around them.
Her novels are just about this—how vast, strange and beautiful the life is, and how terryfying sometimes, and how we are all connected to the world and to everything which breathes on it. It’s sad and joyful in turn, and it always rings true.
Left Hand of Fiction 