Prodigal Summer

Told from three loosely interconnecting perspectives: Deanna, a forest ranger, who has lived off-grid in a remote mountain cabin alone for two years until hunter Eddie Bondo crosses her path; Lusa, whose farmer-husband Cole has died a year into their marriage; and finally Garnett, an elderly widow, who disapproves of (but is obsessed with) his neighbour Nannie.

I am giving this book five stars because I found it captivating and a page-turner, despite the fact that very little really happened and most of it is about nature and food chains and pesticide use and preservation. Deanna's passion is the coyote family which has moved onto her mountain and protecting them from Eddie. Lusa is a moth scientist who takes up goat farming and Garnett show more is trying to produce a blight resistant strain of chestnut tree while mocking Nannie for having an organic orchard. Somehow Kingsolver made me extremely interested in these issues; a small miracle.

I spent the book changing my mind about which sections I enjoyed the most, deciding in the end on Garnett's, but the shifts in perspective work well. I am curious about whether the enormous hollowed out tree was in fact logged or downed by a storm - there were two different versions of this story. It took me longer than it should have done to work out who Garnett's son was. The storyline concerning the softening of Cole's family towards Lusa was well and realistically done, although of the three main protagonists Lusa was the least clearly drawn in my opinion. Sometimes she seemed to exist merely in opposition to the other family members and I kept forgetting she was part Palestinian, despite the fact that this seemed to be very important to her.

The final chapter from the perspective of a coyote drew attention to the similarities between her perspective and that of Deanna. I am curious to read other novels by this author. show less

Reads like a master class in writing about ordinary, yet passionate folks in such a loveable, engaging, and realistic way that it is hard not be drawn in and identify with the struggles, passions, tears and fate of every character. Somehow Kingsolver creates suspense, with the reader pining for her carefully developed and layered characters to meet each other and become friends, tap each other’s founts of knowledge and capabilities, and storm off into the future. This desire is left unfulfilled in the end, leaving space for a part 2 (dunno whether Kingsolver actually wrote a sequel).

So why not 5 stars – Errr… What it lacks is greed, violence, race, extremists, hunger. It is quite an idyllic rural setting, despite all the misery show more and misfortune befalling its characters. It feels like a bubble, disconnected from the wider world. The valley, its farmer folk, its forest and all the animals in it, become a place to wallow in, away from the madding crowd. Not that the novel lacks pretence or engagement with some of the big Questions befuddling humankind: there is ecology, biological versus industrial farming, the future of family farming and the role of the next generation in that, Hunters and the Hunted (Predators and cannon fodder) and the fate befalling each, there is even a bit of climate change. And finally there is the Coyote, in whose skin we walk in the closing episode of the book.

As with all books by Kingsolver I have read so far, the individual characters, besides being layered, humane, passionate and frail, also represent a theme, ideal or normative value. Hence the lifeworld and drives, urges, passions of each character represent a bigger concern in the world that you as a reader can identify with or abhor. To create tension, Kingsolver juxtaposes an opposite value or ideal in the shape of a side-kick or partnering character next to her protagonists. Opposites attract, but they also cause friction, and that’s how Kingsolver keeps us going in a relatively mundane setting, where nothing much happens (though of course the summer she describes is ‘prodigal’, pregnant with new life and unexpected death).

Of the three main protagonists (and their shadows/sidekicks): Deanna’s theme is ecology and evolution, which translates into isolation from the human world, conservationism, anti-hunting (her sidekick Eddy Bondo represents human supremacy, pro-hunting, masculine pride of place, youth and competitive bravado, who ultimately becomes her link to jump back into the human world); Lusa’s theme is recovery, transformation, becoming an insider into an initially hostile community, learning a new trade (foster mother, farmer, using your hands instead of head). Her husband Cole who features briefly before his tragic demise is her opposite in many ways, but he is also representing values and attitudes she comes to appreciate and learn. Lusa’s opposites are many, Cole’s sisters who envy and despise the urbane Lusa; their husbands who are outsiders like Lusa, but fit better as tobacco farmers or factory workers in a rural setting; and there is the youngster, cousin Rick who is the puppy, representing new masculine strength who becomes Lusa’s apprentice; and there is of course Jewel and her kids, who draw Lusa in and at the same time get transformed by her. Finally there are the two ‘old chestnuts’ who have been added for comic effect and represent two radically different ways of farming: Garnett Walker, a retired widower, who worked his life as extension worker promoting high-input agriculture, yet pursues a private passion of reviving the American chestnut by inter-breeding it with a Japanese resistant strain; and there is his equally old female neighbour, Nannie Rawley, who graces every social setting with her down to earth humour and cheerfulness, pursues a biological apple orchard and has spent a hard life as solitary mother raising a child with Down syndrome who was doomed to die. Garnett is the least credible of all characters in this cast (Kingsolver paints him as an old fool, sticking to old world values of productivity and (racial) purity, while I suspect a more humane, realistic elaboration of a Tea Party type of personality would have given the novel more depth, and menace). show less

Deanna is a lone wolf living and working on a mountain in protected lands, ever since her ex-husband left her. Lusa is in a tempestuous but loving relationship with her farmer husband, Cole, though as a "city girl" with an interest in moths she doesn't quite fit in with his loud, rambunctious family. And Garnett just wants to be left alone to grow his chestnuts, but his annoying next door neighbor Nannie has all these newfangled ideas about organic gardening that are driving him crazy.

These three stories intertwine to tell the story of one prodigal summer in Egg Fork, a small Appalachian town. I almost read it as the author writing with love and exasperation about this place and these people. The women in the story especially are show more strong, opinionated, sexual beings. In fact, you'd hardly think this book came out 18 years ago, because other than a lack of cell phones you'd think it was talking about the present. I know I read the story closer to when it came out, but when my book club read it this month I found myself reading with absolutely no memory of what happened, and wondering if some of the subtext about sex and procreation and nature even made sense to me at the time. I enjoyed the three plotlines, especially Lusa as she comes to realize that there's more to her husband's family than she realized. This was an excellent book club read that provoked a lot of discussion. show less

Oh, I did love this book and the title says it all - the reckless use of resources and disregard for anything other than themselves - as local people make their way in rural America.

Told through three strands: Deanna a ranger in the forest, living alone; Lusa married to the only son of one of the farming families and Garnett Walker, an elderly man who is attempting to breed a chestnut tree that is not affected by the blight which has wiped them all out.

What Kingsolver does so well is demonstrate that diversity is necessary which is shown through the multiple perspectives in the book, the need for diversity in nature as shown through the chestnut trees and diversity of ideas as shown by Lusa who married into the local family but brings show more perspectives from Palastine and Poland into a community who rarely travel far.

The three stories run in parallel but with hints and objects and finally relationships spilling over into each story with you, the reader, having to track them down.

When I started reading the book I felt that Deanna was the person who Kingsolver most identified with (this changed as I read on) because she was living alone in the forest, there to protect it but also a believer in the fact that people should be kept out of it.

This mountain would be a superior place if people stayed off it altogether.
p250

The idea of nature being left alone with little to no human interaction. This is a problem because there is a coyote hunt every year and Deanna is tracking and watching a coyote family raise their young. She meets a younger man, Eddie, who stays with her for three months, a hunter after coyote. Her need for Eddie destroys the idea of isolationism and points us to the fact that nature and humans need to co-exist as one. The coyotes have migrated to the hills and forest but will restore the imbalance caused by the loss of large predators. And this starts the dialogue that also runs through the book about the conflict between native and non-native species both in the animal and plant worlds as well as with humans.

Lusa lives in the family farm house but not long after her marriage, her husband, Cole, is killed in a road accident and she is left to find her own way. She is an outsider, a non-native, and does things differently, all of which are commented on by the large family and community. The farm is losing money and she alone has to find a way out of the situation which she does by bringing her knowledge of other cultures to bear on her situation. But alongside these differences, she also has to call on local knowledge to help her. The answer is local to local problems but informed by the wider world. However, running through her story is the strand of honeysuckle which her husband is in constant battle with. Lusa doesn't see the importance of this battle, it's only a bit of honeysuckle, until after he has died and the plant takes over their garage - it is a rampant and an invasive plant in the Appalachians, just like Kudzu. So here again we have the idea that one point of view is insufficient and that we need both to move forwards. This was the strand of the book I enjoyed most.

Garnett Walker was older than the other characters, swayed by God and the bible but with a desire to find a chestnut that would survive in the current conditions. Throughout the book are examples where the hunting or killing means other populations increase, including the one you are hunting but not for the chestnuts. Garnett's father cut down all the chestnuts in the forest to prevent them getting the disease but this means that ones which might have been resistant to the blight were also removed. There remain trees across the landscape that have survived but they do not live near enough to each other to pollnate and produce more trees. They are left alone, isolated, becoming older and dying out. Shades here of Deanna in her forest and of rural communities. It does raise the question of what we should be doing with Ash trees in the UK with Ash die back. There are places where all the Ash have been cut down but we will also have lost those that are resistant to the virus and so lost our ability to repopulate the growing spaces.

Every species has its extremes, little pockets of resistance that give it an edge on survival.
p176

There are also the people in this story. Jewel the sister-in-law dying of cancer along with Garnett's wife - we are left to wonder whether the chemicals used on the land caused this. Jewel's children will need looking after but Kingsolver shows them as completely ignorant about their own land and what lives on it. Traces here of the much later book The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris.

The book began as a response to the removal of everyday nature words - among them "acorn", "bluebell", "kingfisher" and "wren" - from a widely used children’s dictionary, because those words were not being used enough by children to merit inclusion. But The Lost Words then grew to become a much broader protest at the loss of the natural world around us, as well as a celebration of the creatures and plants with which we share our lives, in all their wonderful, characterful glory
https://www.thelostwords.org/lostwordsbook/

The interweaving of what happens in the natural world also happening in the human world, after all, despite what we do we are all part of one world together, is a real strength of the story. The Widener family, whose farm much of the story takes place on, is in danger of becoming extinct, particularly if it doesn't change or adapt and for that it needs someone from the outside to help. The book shows us that the black and white contrasts between rural vs urban, native vs non-native, humans vs non-humans and local vs global are not helpful in finding a way forwards. It is the chaos of all ideas coming together and impacting on each other that finds a way forwards, not the exclusion of some. A lesson that is as apposite today as it was in 2000 when the book was written. show less

Listening to this was like a visit home. The interwoven stories are quite enjoyable in their own right. But it is Kingsolver's unerring touch with the language -- the rhythms and the idioms of the southern Blue Ridge -- that lift this book above a mere character study. The ecological lessons woven into the stories and dialog are icing on the cake.
[Audiobook note: Kingsolver herself narrates the book. This, too, is a gift because an outsider can never quite get the southern Appalachian accent right.]

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 show more 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. show less

After hearing Barbara Kingsolver speak in Cambridge last week about her new book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (to be read and reviewed in its own right soon) I decided I'd like to try one of her novels, so on a friend's recommendation I picked up a copy of Prodigal Summer at the shop. I found it one of those books where I was torn between wanting to read slowly, rationing chapters to prolong the experience, and wanting to just settle in with it for a few sustained hours and read the whole thing at once. On a lazy Memorial Day weekend, you can probably guess which won out.

Prodigal Summer tells the stories of three very different people whose lives end up intricately connected by the time the book - but not their stories - comes to a show more close. Kingsolver's style is simple and easy to understand, but at the same time she's expertly captured the essences of rural life and the important connections between and among people and their environment. She writes of the natural world - of birdsong and ginseng, chestnut blight and blacksnakes - with the ease and detail of someone who's experienced it. I could practically hear the wood thrushes and magnolia warblers, and was delighted to find that this book dredged up a few memories from my own childhood, of wandering on my grandpa's hillsides looking for ginseng and admiring our few remaining chestnut trees.

Beyond the beautiful descriptive prose and emotion-rich narratives, Kingsolver's book also contains a strong and recurring environmental message. I noticed several precursors of the "locavore" (eat local) philosophy she discusses more fully in the new book, and many of the characters in Prodigal Summer grapple with questions of pesticide and resource use, food chains and the like. If these themes seem to be a bit heavy-handed at times, it's because they haven't sunk in for us yet, and we need every reminder we can get. As Kingsolver writes, in a line I've already memorized, "Every choice is a world made new for the chosen."

This is an important book, both for its message(s) and for its simple, elegant prose. I'm glad I read it.

http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2007/05/book-review-prodigal-summer.html show less