Prodigal Summer
by Barbara Kingsolver

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Book Reviews of Prodigal Summer

Book Review: One of the best of this year
Summary: 5 Stars

Deanna Wolfe lives in the forest, a biologist by training. She is quick to spot that a small troupe of coyotes has moved into the area. This reflects an unusual trend: despite the coyote being the most hunted animal in the United States, its population has increased. However, Deanna falls prey to the handsome Eddie Bondo, a real hunter. Her attraction to him is at odds with her desire to protect the coyote. Eddie comes from the sheep ranches of Wyoming, and he regards the coyote as his enemy. Almost despite herself, Deanna feels the necessity to act on her own animal needs. Lusa Maluf Landowski is also a biologist. She has been brought to Zebulon by her marriage to one of the local farmers. Her life is not exactly idyllic, but it's soon to be shattered. She's left with the choice of having to stay on her land or go. Although both her parents were brought up on farms, Lusa knows very little about the practicalities of running her own. However, Lusa has a Jewish and Arab bloodline, and at one telling moment, she reveals how both her families had been run off their farms in the past: once because they were Jewish, and once because they were not. She has to struggle to make a living, guided greatly by a young nephew who's flushed with adolescent hormones. Garnett Walker conducts a daily battle to restore the American Chestnut, commonly thought of as dead due to the blight. He wants to restore the landscape to the one that his father and grandfather knew and built. However, God has given him a cross to bear by granting him Nannie Crawley as a neighbour. Nannie is the local champion of organic farming, and her bid to avoid any drop of herbicide or insecticide touching her apples drives Garnett mad. These neighbours are also fiercely divided in their respective attitudes towards God, but there's always the most implacable of snapping turtles there that seems destined to clamp these two old folk together.

In her depiction of forest life, Barbara Kingsolver reminds you of Edward Rutherfurd's glorious novel of this year, 'The Forest', especially in the portrait of a community where everyone seems distantly related to each other. The last section is also reminiscent of Rutherfurd's passages concerning the New Forest's other inhabitants. There's also a great love of apples and bees, something that Joanne Harris dwells on at depth in her novel 'Blackberry Wine'. However, I suspect that Kingsolver would not share Harries' dislike of wasps. For her, the predator is king. A spider is not something to be stepped upon lightly; sharks and wolves should not be hunted to extinction, since this reckless slaughter mucks up the whole ecosystem. Kingsolver throws into the debate contemporary thinking on keystone predators, parasitic hymenoptera, and reveals old truths, like the pituitary gland that used to make women fertile as they slept under the full moon in the ancient depths of time. I found Kingsolver's introduction to be compelling reading. It's also great that you can access Kingsolver's source materials. I was thrilled to find Mike Finkel's article about the coyote. To my mind, this makes 'Prodigal Summer' ones of those ideal novels where you learn a great deal, but are also gripped by the various narrative twists and turns. Some of the fiction that has involved me recently has featured the natural world, whether it be the bugs of Neal Asher's science fiction, or the contemporary human stories that is Kingsolver's fodder. Kingsolver is a natural storyteller in more ways than one.

Kingsolver follows the general advice of writing what she knows. She lives in the Appalachians, and is a biologist by training. She also has a very liberal outlook, which I find especially affirming. However, this novel could be quite controversial. The genetic versus organic farming debate hasn't really hit the States as yet, but this popular novel could quite well spark it off. It's also a theme that is hugely topical in my native Britain at the moment. What makes Kingsolver so compelling, however, is her research and knowledge. Although I'm pretty much converted to eating organic, Kingsolver has much that is new to say to me too. She's certainly made me look at spiders in a whole new perspective and respect. Barbara Kingsolver could cure your phobias too. Certainly, if the world were run her way, I suspect we'd all have fewer allergies. We'd certainly build more bridges between each other. At the very least, this is an incredible life-affirming novel that deserves to become the keystone predator of any current book chart.

Summary of Prodigal Summer

Barbara Kingsolver, a writer praised for her"extravagantly gifted narrative voice" (New York Times Book Review), has created with this novel a hymn to wildness that celebrates the prodigal spirit of human nature, and of nature itself.

Prodigal Summer weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives inhabiting the forested mountains and struggling small farms of southern Appalachia. At the heart of these intertwined narratives is a den of coyotes that have recently migrated into the region. Deanna Wolfe, a reclusive wildlife biologist, watches the forest from her outpost in an isolated mountain cabin where she is caught off-guard by Eddie Bondo, a young hunter who comes to invade her most private spaces and confound her self-assured, solitary life. On a farm several miles down the mountain, another web of lives unfolds as Lusa Maluf Landowski, a bookish city girl turned farmer's wife, finds herself unexpectedly marooned in a strange place where she must declare or lose her attachment to the land. And a few more miles down the road, a pair of elderly, feuding neighbors tend their respective farms and wrangle about God, pesticides, and the complexities of a world neither of them expected.

Over the course of one humid summer, as the urge to procreate overtakes a green and profligate countryside, these characters find connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with which they necessarily share a place. Their discoveries are embedded inside countless intimate lessons of biology, the realities of small farming, and the final, urgent truth that humans are only one part of life on earth.

With the richness that characterizes Barbara Kingsolver's finest work, Prodigal Summer embraces pure thematic originality and demonstrates a balance of narrative and ideas that only an accomplished novelist could render so beautifully.

Exuberant, lush, riotous--the summer of the novel is "the season of extravagant procreation" in which bullfrogs carelessly lay their jellied masses of eggs in the grass, "apparently confident that their tadpoles would be able to swim through the lawn like little sperms," and in which a woman may learn to "tell time with her skin." It is also the summer in which a family of coyotes moves into the mountains above Zebulon Valley:

The ghost of a creature long extinct was coming in on silent footprints, returning to the place it had once held in the complex anatomy of this forest like a beating heart returned to its body. This is what she believed she would see, if she watched, at this magical juncture: a restoration.

Structurally, that gossamer web is the story: images, phrases, and events link the narratives, and these echoes are rarely obvious, always serendipitous. Kingsolver is one of those authors for whom the terrifying elegance of nature is both aesthetic wonder and source of a fierce and abiding moral vision. She may have inherited Thoreau's mantle, but she piles up riches of her own making, blending her extravagant narrative gift with benevolent concise humor. She treads the line between the sentimental and the glorious like nobody else in American literature. --Kelly Flynn

United States Books

• Subjects > Literature & Fiction > United States
• Literary