Review of Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer

As in her earlier novels The Poisonwood Bible and Pigs In Heaven, Barbara Kingsolver demonstrates an ability to conflate a resonant and gripping narrative – rich with splashes of wit and an earthy poetry of description – with inspiring themes and original leitmotifs in her use of imagery.

Her latest book evinces a moral vision of nature. It is a neo-Romantic sensibility emphasising the still undiscovered mysteries of the earth – the philosophical truths the flora and fauna have yet to teach us. It is also a poetic reminder of humankind’s inextricable relationship with the natural environment.

In the opening pages of the novel, the reader is presented with a simple proposition, that “solitude is only a human presumption”, how “every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot: every choice is a world made new for the chosen”.

These lines are repeated as a final echo when the novel comes to a close, creating an overall unity in the book’s theme of the dynamic between human beings and the natural world, how they affect each other in significant ways.

This idea manifests itself in narrative descriptions, like how the female protagonist, while observing toadstools on the ground, becomes “unconscious of the elegant length of her nose and chin in profile, unaware of her left hand moving near her face to disperse a cloud of gnats…”

It is as if nature is observing the observer, adopting a human perspective that fuses with the reader’s own point of view. It is an ingenious way of capturing the mysterious dynamic between the earth and the people who are its occupants.

Prodigal Summer is an elegant overlapping of three different stories set on the mountains of Southern Appalachia. A central event revolves around a family of coyotes migrating “on silent footprints” into the mountains above Zebulon Valley.

Watching this with great interest is wildlife biologist Deanna Wolfe, a divorcee whose life is disrupted when she finds herself being drawn both physically and emotionally to Eddie Bondo, a young hunter who penetrates her quiet, reclusive life in the forest, where she hermetically spends her time “keeping an eye on paradise.”

Man as animal is an idea that Kingsolver emphasises subtly within her narrative. She writes about the “animal movement” of Eddie’s hair as seen by Deanna, as she is increasingly drawn towards the hunter. Or when Lusa compares the scent of her husband to the one a moth produces when mating, which becomes a poignant metaphor for the fundamental nature of their love.

Not too far away, a “National Science Foundation Scholar”, Lusa Maluf Landowski, wonders if she should have left her career in the city to live with her farmer husband, a marriage that grows increasingly difficult until he dies suddenly. And she has to decide whether to leave the natural setting she had romanticised for so long.

The third story deals with the antagonistic relationship between two elderly farmers, Nannie and Garnette. The two neighbours argue about anything from the use of pesticides to more profound issues about God and nature.

It is the female protagonists who are attuned to the natural world around them, who possess an impressive grasp of its taxonomy, and who reveals a personal fondness for misunderstood creatures of the forest. The men, on the other hand, provide a counterpoint in their own aversion to the women’s attachment to the natural environment.

There is a reflection of the marginalisation of women in society in the way nature is subjugated and denied freedom to flourish on its own terms.

But this is a feminist reading of a text that has more to say about how we should remember our roots in the natural world. The novel is an inspiring paean to wildness as well as a celebration of the human spirit.

The constant flow of natural images, the endless revelations of the earth that Kingsolver provides throughout her narrative, and the altered lives of the various protagonists will ring like an echo in the reader’s imagination.

Published in The Straits Times, Life! on 20 Jan 2001