Review Tuesday: Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver - #ReviewTuesday #Politics #Family

Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver

Harper Collins, 2018

This is not supposed to happen in America. After working hard for decades, paying your taxes, bringing up your kids to be good citizens, you’re not supposed to find yourself destitute and close to homeless. Yet that’s the situation in which journalist Willa Knox and her professor husband Iano find themselves, when her magazine folds, the university where he’d finally got tenure closes, and they’re forced to move to a century-old house that’s literally crumbling around them. With no income and little savings, they’re only a few weeks away from living on the street.

The house, a legacy from Willa’s aunt, is part of the former Utopian community of Vineland, founded by a wealthy businessman who was either a visionary philanthropist or an egotistical despot, depending on who you believe. Its leaking roof, moldy walls and rotting floors also provide the shelter of last resort for Iano’s bigoted curmudgeon of a father, slowly expiring from multiple chronic diseases, and their radical socialist daughter Tig (Antigone). As if that were not enough, Willa also finds herself forced to take in a newborn baby boy when her son Zeke’s upper class girlfriend kills herself. Living hand to mouth, camping out on the ground floor of the old house as one room after another becomes unsafe, Willa wonders how the family is going to find their next meal, let alone deal with grandfather Nico’s health issues.

Meanwhile, more than a century earlier, another family struggles to make a life in Vineland. Thatcher Greenwood views himself as fortunate. Though he grew up in poverty and hardship, somehow he managed to snag the hand of lovely, elegant Rose. A self-educated scientist, he has been hired to teach in the Vineland school. He hopes he can support not only his beautiful and somewhat demanding wife, but also her mother and her teenage sister Polly, and make enough to repair their deteriorating dwelling. However, his ardent belief in the controversial evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin sets him on a collision course with the conservative powers in Vineland – a course that could easily lead to his dismissal. His growing friendship with his next door neighbor, amateur naturalist Mary Treat, is the only bright spot in his increasingly difficult existence.

As you might imagine from this brief description, Unsheltered is an ambitious novel with a broad scope. It touches upon many important themes: family ties and conflicts, man’s role in nature, social inequity, preserving history, physical and mental illness, and of course love. I say “of course” because ultimately that’s the only path that leads out of the morass: love for your partner, for your children, for your neighbors, for humanity.

Like all the Barbara Kingsolver books I’ve read, this one is rich with emotion, often painful. Life isn’t easy. Tragedies are to be expected. Yet somehow we manage to pull through.

The structure of the book is strongly parallel, to the extent that it felt somewhat contrived. The chapters alternate between the present (well – 2016, during the last presidential election in the U.S.) and the past. The last words in one chapter become the title of the following chapter. Other Kingsolver novels I’ve read felt much more relaxed and free-wheeling. In this book, it’s clear, the author has specific points she wants to make. Willa and Thatcher share many characteristics, as they inhabit the same space a century apart. In some ways the world has not changed; the same voices that excoriated Darwin in the nineteenth century condemn the warnings of the climate scientists in the twentieth.

I personally agree with most of Ms. Kingsolver’s positions, but I think I would have enjoyed Unsheltered more if it had been less blatantly political.

The characters in Unsheltered are wonderful, especially Tig, the dread-locked rebel who finds herself holding the family together, and the quietly self-directed Mary Treat. All of them grow and change, individually and in their relationships with the others. Meanwhile, as always, Ms. Kingsolver writes beautifully, the sort of prose where you find yourself going back to re-read a page just to savor its beauty. The book has a pleasingly unexpected ending, as long-nurtured hopes crumble but new possibilities appear. There’s not exactly a happily ever after, but you have the sense that Willa and her tribe will make it through. And after some of the more harrowing aspects of the book, that feels like a triumph.

Review Tuesday: Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver #NativeAmerican #Family #ReviewTuesday

Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver

Harper Collins, 1993

Taylor Greer never wanted children. In the small Kentucky town where she grew up, it took serious effort to get through high school without getting pregnant. Then, as she was driving west, fleeing the bleak prospects in her home town, fate dumped a three year old Indian girl in her lap, and she found herself embracing motherhood despite herself.

Three years later, she and Turtle have settled in Tucson, where she has a job, friends, a lover, and an altogether richer life than she ever expected. Then Turtle witnesses a freak accident, saves a man’s life and winds up on the Oprah Winfrey show. Her appearance attracts the attention of a lawyer for the Cherokee Nation, who sets out on a campaign to return the child to the tribe – even if that means tearing her away from her adoptive mother.

Pigs in Heaven, a sequel to The Bean Trees, is both deeply moving and hilariously funny. It would have been easy to make the female lawyer into a villain, but the author shows us that she has valid reasons for wanting to Turtle to grow up within the culture of her ancestors. Ms. Kingsolver treads delicately, exploring both sides of the question. The portrait she paints of Heaven, Oklahoma, doesn’t shy away from the grinding poverty or the desperation of its Native American inhabitants, but at the same time reveals a community deeply embedded in the natural world, where everyone is viewed as family.

The Bean Trees was told almost entirely from Taylor’s perspective. Pigs in Heaven has a much larger set of characters and voices. This is both a strength and a weakness; it adds complexity and interest, but undermines, to some extent, the structural unity of the novel. The book has a bit of a rambling quality at times. Still, things knit together in the end, in a satisfying if not totally surprising manner.

Barbara Kingsolver writes lovely, evocative prose that can literally bring tears to my eyes. I picked up this book and read the first chapter. I found it so astonishing, so gloriously observant, so subtle and emotionally true, that I immediately went back to read the entire chapter again.

Though it has some flaws, overall Pigs in Heaven is a gem.

Review Tuesday:Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver (#romance #literature #reviewtuesday)

 
Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver

Harper Perennial, 1991

Have you ever encountered a book so beautifully written that you can’t bear to read more than half a dozen pages at a time? Of course you want to know what’s going to happen, but then you encounter paragraphs that just stop you in your tracks with their perfection. Sometimes the emotions portrayed overwhelm you with their intricacy and their truth. Other times it’s the aptness of some metaphor or the vibrancy of some description. It’s tough to make progress in a book like that. One doesn’t want to squander the experience, the sense of wonder that comes from such exquisitely fashioned prose.

Barbara Kingsolver’s books seem to have this effect on me. Her brief biography on the back of Animal Dreams says she’s “a writer of fiction, non-fiction and poetry”. The poetry explains it all. In a poem, as in her books, every word counts. With a sort of splendid humility, in concise, direct sentences that somehow convey profound meaning, Ms. Kingsolver gradually exposes her vivid, flawed characters as they stumble through their lives.

About a year ago I read Ms. Kingsolver’s more recent novel, Flight Behavior. I found it so stunning I couldn’t bring myself to review it. Honestly, I felt I couldn’t do it justice. When I finished this earlier book of hers a few days ago, I vowed I’d write a review before I lost my nerve.

Cosima "Codi" Noline returns to her tiny, traditional hometown of Grace, Arizona after a self-exile of more than a decade, because she doesn’t know where else to go. Her beloved younger sister Hallie, with whom she shares the sort of closeness usually reserved for twins, has set off to civil-war-torn Nicaragua to offer her expertise as an agriculturist to the peasants trying to build a new society. Her father, the emotionally distant physician who has ministered to Grace’s ailments for forty years, has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and Codi feels some sense of responsibility toward him, despite her conviction that he neither loves nor approves of her. She does not belong in Grace, though, or so she believes. The problem with Codi is that she doesn’t belong anywhere.

As she takes on a one year contract as a high school biology teacher and struggles to reconnect with people from her childhood, she tells herself she’s just passing through—that she can’t and won’t make a commitment to these strangers. Even when she falls in love with a high school flame, and lends her scientific expertise to a campaign to save Grace from ecological disaster, she holds on to the notion that her stay in Grace is temporary. She has lost too much in the course of her life—her mother, her unborn child, her father’s love, her sister’s company—to trust in any sort of enduring happiness. At the end of her contract, she heads for Colorado, running away from Grace one more time. You can’t run from your fears, though—or from your dreams.

The synopsis above doesn’t even begin to capture the emotional complexities in Animal Dreams. Codi is so deeply scarred she’s ready to throw away the love she’s always craved, to leave the home for which she hungers. She’s a bit of an extreme character, but Ms. Kingsolver makes her believable, partly by providing brief glimpses into the deteriorating mind of Codi’s father, Homero Noline. The doctor’s memory wanders through time, reliving events from his daughters’ childhood, confusing Codi the gangly, willful child with the young woman who has returned to care for him. These three or four page sections, scattered throughout the book, provide a sort of tragic insight into Codi’s history and show the reader how much Hector loves his daughters, and how blind the heart can be.

One of the joys of this book is the rich, affectionate portrait it paints of the American southwest. Codi’s lover Loyd is Native American. There are marvelous scenes among the ancient ruins of Canyon de Chelly and in a contemporary Pueblo community. The novel brings Grace to vivid life: the red-shingled houses clinging to the steep walls of a river gorge, surrounded by pecan and plum orchards and anchored by the formidable old women who are its heart. Its inhabitants people leap off the page, quirky, old-fashioned, distinctive, and nobody’s fools.

Here’s a paragraph from page 9—an example of the simple yet evocative prose that fills this marvelous book.

I was the only passenger getting off. The short, imperious bus driver opened the baggage door and made a show of dragging out luggage to get to mine, as if I were being difficult. A more accommodating woman, he implied, would be content with whatever bags happened to be right in front. Finally he slapped my two huge suitcases flat out in the dust. He slammed the doors and reclaimed his throne, causing the bus to bark like a dog, leaving a cloud of exhaust in the air, getting the last word, I suppose.

And here is the amazing first love scene:

He leaned over and I took his head in my hands and gave him the kiss I’d been thinking about for the last two hours. It lasted a good long while. He twisted his fingers gently through the hair at the back of my skull and held on tight, and my breath stopped while he laid down a track of small kisses from my earlobe to my collar bone. We lay back on the grass and I rolled against him, looking down into his eyes. They were dark brown, a color with depth to it, like stained glass. It was a little surprising to look at brown eyes after all the pale blues of Grace.

Just being held felt unbelievably good, the long drink I’d been dying for. For a second I hugged back as tightly as I could. Something inside his buttoned shirt pocket made a crackling cellophane sound. I raised up a little and poked it with my finger. “If you’ve got a condom in your pocket, Loyd Peregrina, this is my lucky day.”

He did. It was.

To be able to write like this, I’d be tempted to sell my soul.

Get yourself a copy of Animal Dreams. It might inspire you as much as it did me.