A love letter to Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver

Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver (2000)

Length: 464 pages

Genre: Literary Fiction

I generally don’t write reviews of books I’m re-reading, and certainly not of books I’m re-reading for the nth time. If I like a book enough to read it many times over, I usually can’t articulate why I love it so much – I just do. But damned if I’m not going to try anyways for Prodigal Summer. Kingsolver is easily one of my favorite authors, and this book is what made it so. I’ve read the book two or three times, and listened to the audiobook (read wonderfully by Kingsolver herself) at least that many (and am currently in the middle of yet another re-listen). So, for the sake of those of you who might not have heard of it, or might have passed it over in the past, here’s my love letter to this wonderful book. I’ll try to keep the fangirl SQUEEEEing to a minimum.

Summary: Prodigal Summer is an interweaving of three storylines, all taking place during the course of one summer in and around Egg Fork, Tennessee. In the chapters entitled “Predators”, Deanna Wolf, forest ranger and wildlife biologist lives alone in a small cabin in the National Forest, watching the changes wrought in the ecosystem by the return of a predator – the coyote. When she meets Eddie Bondo, a young rancher who hunts coyotes for sport, they are powerfully physically drawn together, despite the ideological differences that threaten to tear them apart. In “Moth Love”, newly-married and newly-widowed city girl Lusa is left alone on her husband’s family farm, surrounded by unfamiliar and hostile in-laws, and facing the prospect of carving out a place for herself in farming and in her new family. In “Old Chestnuts”, Garnett Walker, a retired agriculture teacher whose pet project is the cultivation of a blight-resistant American Chestnut tree, butts heads with his free-spirited and utterly confounding neighbor, Nannie Rawley. Though initially seeming quite disparate, these three stories slowly reveal their connections, ultimately resulting in a vibrant tapestry rich with luna moths and magnolia warblers, coyotes and chestnut trees, life and death and humor and love and place and home and belonging.

Review: Prodigal Summer has been called Barbara Kingsolver’s “sex book,” both disparagingly and with affection. There certainly are a few “on-camera” sex scenes, although they’re not written particularly graphically – Kingsolver herself has said while the themes of sex and fecundity are central to the novel, perhaps the most graphic sex scene is a dream sequence between a woman and a giant moth. However, to call it her “sex book” is to dismiss it too easily, and to overlook what I think is the point of the story. It’s only about sex insomuch as everything in life is about sex – the struggle of each individual to pass on their genes, and leave something of themselves to the next generation. Calling it her “biology book” would be better (more on that in a minute), but the main theme of this book isn’t sex, or biology – it’s interconnection. This is most immediately apparent in the interlacing of the three storylines, which seem totally unrelated at first, but slowly yield up their connections, both major and minor, revealing the infinite number of tiny but not insubstantial ways that each of us touch the lives around us. But more than just personal interconnection, it also speaks to the connection of people to their environment, of the threads that bind us to the non-human lives around us – and of them to each other – resulting in a world that is a shining mass of sparkling threads of connection, where each life – moth, tree, or human – affects every other, and each life matters.

The ultimate result of this finely-drawn sense of connection is that Zebulon County emerges as a place with a sense of Place; essentially another character in its own right. I first read Prodigal Summer in the spring of 2002, long before I’d ever been to Appalachia, but Egg Fork and the surrounding mountains were more real to me than any place I’d encountered in a novel before. Now, six years and several summers of working in the southern Appalachian mountains later, I can say that Kingsolver absolutely gets it right. The forest, the small town, the farms, the people, the animals, the mountains – it’s all there, vividly drawn, and pulsing with Life. Her characters are similarly real; by the end of the book you feel like you’ve known these people your whole life – not people like them, but them. Even with only a third as much space per story as in a traditional novel, Kingsolver still manages to draw complex, multi-layered, and lovably flawed people who feel as though you would recognize them walking down the street.

I will admit that I was predisposed to like this book – Kingsolver has a degree in biology (my own field), and was a science writer before becoming a full-time author. You can see the traces of this in all of her books, but nowhere is it brought to the fore like in Prodigal Summer. At the same time, the biology isn’t blatant – it simultaneously motivates the stories without overshadowing them. Subtle points about ecology, evolution, and natural history are woven into the the overall framework, complementing and informing rather than detracting from the human drama.

I said that this is the book that made me love Kingsolver as a writer, but I’d like to do that one better. This is the book that makes me want to be a writer; this is the book I wish I could have written. I’ve read it enough times that I know some passages and bits of dialogue and turns of phrase by heart, but every time I read it, I’m left in awe of her powers of story construction and character development. Every time I read it, I’m left with a renewed sense of wonder in the the power of Life, and a renewed appreciation for what a miraculous, sacred place and community we are all a part of. 5 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: Highly, highly recommended, obviously. :)

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First Lines:

Her body moved with the frankness that comes from solitary habits. But solitude is only a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot; every choice is a world made new for the chosen.