Prodigal Summer, by Barbara Kingsolver

HarperCollins; Publication date: October, 2000

$26.00 / ISBN 0060199652

444 pages

Barbara Kingsolver's new book, "Prodigal Summer," takes place right here in the steep mountains and narrow valleys of Southwest Virginia. The specific location is never given (Zebulon is the fictional name), but we know it's somewhere near the Kentucky border, amidst the National Forest, in a region that gains an urban identity from Roanoke. And we recognize our own region in her vivid evocation of people and place. Kingsolver splits her time between Tucson, Arizona and Southwestern Appalachia, and she has said in an interview that you can’t just visit a place and write about. You have to know "what it smells like after rain, the quality of the air on your face, what's blooming in May and how that has changed in July, and you have to know how people talk."

Raised in Eastern Kentucky, Kingsolver does know how people talk in this region and what they might talk about if they were to engage in ecological debates. Kingsolver has a graduate degree in biology and her husband is an ornithologist. In her new novel, Kingsolver has put on her field glasses, so to speak, and come up with a fine specimen.

The book weaves together several lives: a forest ranger trying to protect coyotes, an elderly gentlemen working on bringing back the American chestnut, an organic orchard grower, and a widowed entomologist who married in from the outside but is now trying to hold on to the family farm. The latter, Lusa Maluf Landowski ("My mom's Palestinian and my dad's a Polish Jew"), condemns growing tobacco: "Half the world's starving . . . we're sitting on some of the richest dirt on this planet, and I'm going to grow drugs instead of food?" "Why plant tobacco when everybody's trying to quit smoking? Or should be trying to, if they're not already."

Each story is a love story of sorts, and each attacks the arrogance with which humans "have dominion" (the argument with literal interpretations of the Bible is there) over the earth and its species. One of the feisty female characters, Deanna Wolfe, explains to her lover during a quarrel that he and his bounty hunter buddies actually help coyotes flourish by killing them (Kingsolver read a cover story on it in Audobon, May 1999).

Among its many lectures are some on "the birds and bees." Prodigal summer is the season of "extended procreation," which follows spring, "heav[ing] in its randy moment." It's as if Kingsolver wanted to throw open the windows of American nature writing, a surprisingly cloistered genre where nature exists for meditation and solitude rather than ecstasy and intimacy. In this book, nature is chorus of coitus, where bodies are driven by pheromones and natural cycles of the moon, with "no more choice of [their] natural history than an orchid has, or the bee it needs." The success of this book may ultimately derive from Kingsolver's ability to make natural history sexy, to mix didacticism with lovers "falling together like a pair of hawks."

Readers who expect the intensity of "Poisonwood Bible" may be disappointed, but those looking for the Kingsolver of "The Bean Trees" and "Animal Dreams," with their spirited heroines, liberal politics, and natural splendor, will be pleased. This book also marks a return to Kingsolver's sense of humor. The crotchety chestnut grower, former teacher, and 4-H liaison, Garnett Walker, walks out of a swamp with a snapping turtle clutching his boot while he wars with his neighbor, a Unitarian who he imagines dabbles in witchcraft and, worse, doesn't "wear proper foundation garments." She's also a graduate of that agricultural school (in a county nearby) that was "asking for it when they let in women." Kingsolver humorously characterizes Walker as both cavalier and foolish, juxtaposing his outmoded chivalric code (and his ideas on pesticides) with his petty attempts at revenge. The female characters in the novel hardly ever get their comeuppance for their highmindedness, while men fare about as well as some of their counterparts in the insect world do after mating. But they behave in a way just about everything else in Kingsolver's novel does--true to nature.

This book resonates with the author's enthusiasm for the biological exigencies of life on earth, "a world baked fresh daily," as she describes it in her acknowledgements. We learn about ginseng, morels, and paw-paws, about exotic species and chestnut blight, and about how coyotes have vocal systems more complex than any other land mammals. We learn about other matters pertaining to the food chain, small farming, and the web of life in a work as informative as it is enticing.