Books Reviewed

By Jonne Hower

Spring 2003

Prodigal Summer.  Barbara Kingsolver.  Harper-Collins Publishers, Perennial, New York.  2001.  Softbound. 

Change in the American West.  Exploring the Human Dimension.  Stephen Tchudi, Editor. University of Nevada Press, Reno, Nevada.  1996.  Hardcover.

There are as many different reasons for reading as there are books to read.  There’s education, there’s enlightenment, and then there’s plain old entertainment.  Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer would provide a great vacation read.  In fact, my cousin loaned me a copy so I could read it last summer, but I resisted because I hadn’t liked earlier books by the author.  Now, after spending the weekend curled in front of my fireplace with Prodigal Summer, I wish I hadn’t resisted. 

Prodigal Summer is really three stories in one book.  These are not presented one after the other, but with alternate episodes throughout the book.  Kingsolver has named each storyline differently: “Predators,” “Moth Love,” and “Old Chestnuts.”  Instead of using chapter titles, Kingsolver just provides the story title and picks up where she left off; sometimes she follows a pattern in moving between stories and sometimes she doesn’t.  All three stories are set in the same geographic area—one special mountain and the valley below, somewhere in Kentucky—and in the close-knit way of mountain kin, characters from one story are related to some in another story. 

“Predators” tells the story of wilderness ranger Deanna Wolfe, a grant recipient who has convinced the local Forest Service and Park Service officials that she should monitor an entire mountainside.  She was born and bred in the valley below and has returned to her homeplace with her grant monies to avoid contact with the rest of society, as well as study canid predators.  She lives alone in a primitive cabin and a young Forest Service employee delivers her groceries and kerosene once a month.   

In the opening pages of the book, Deanna tracks an animal.  It is later revealed that she is a life-long student of the coyote and believes that a pack has finally moved to her mountain.  As she tracks one day, she meets a stranger on the mountain, the elusive Eddie Bondo:

And there he stood, looking straight at her. . . . Surprise must have stormed all over her face before she thought to arrange it for human inspection. . . .she always saw them first.  This one had stolen her advent—he’d seen inside her. 

In “Moth Love,” we follow the backwards story of the marriage between Lusa and Cole Widener.  It’s backwards because the newlywed groom is killed in a truck accident soon after their marriage at the beginning of this story, and the young widow only comes to truly know her husband through his five sisters and brothers-in-law and uncounted nieces and nephews, all of whom surround the family farm she now finds as her home.  Lusa also learns much from the honeysuckle, the fruit trees, and the garden on the farm.  During the course of the story, she rids her pasture of cattle and populates it with meat goats, planning to sell them to her cousin the butcher in New York City.  Lusa is an outsider, an educated city girl, and a modern woman, and she keeps her maiden name until after her husband’s death.  In the end, Lusa decides to remain on the family farm and to adopt a niece and nephew when her terminally-ill sister-in-law dies.  Lusa explains her plans to at last take her husband’s name to her sister-in-law: 

“It’s just seems right to [adopt them],” Lusa explained, feeling self-conscious.  “I’m thinking I’d add ‘Widener’ to their names, if that’s all right with you.  I’m taking it too.”

“Moth Love” is a story of the changes that overtake both Lusa and her husband’s family, and how they come together in warm and loving synergy.  

The third and final story unfolds as Garnett Walker, a widower and devout fundamentalist Christian, comes to terms with his life-long neighbor, organic farmer Nannie Rawley.  Nannie is a complex, intelligent woman whose past includes the birth (and loss) of a developmentally disabled child.  Nannie sneaks out at night to move her “no spray” signs far enough down the road to ensure that drifting pesticides and herbicides from neighboring farms, including Garnett’s, don’t invade her apple orchard.  But, the widower neighbor is not simple and straightforward, either.  He is spending his retirement years cross-breeding American chestnuts with the Chinese chestnut in an attempt to create a blight-resistant tree that could repopulate the local mountain.  In a wonderful finish, Garnett storms down to Nannie’s garden to protect her from a man who has been hanging around suspiciously for two days.  With surprise and consternation, Nannie says:

“And you came over here with your shotgun to protect me from my scarecrow?”  “I had to,” Garnett said, spreading his hands, throwing himself on her mercy.  “I didn’t care for the way Buddy was looking at you in your short pants.” 

According to Barbara Kingsolver’s website (www.kingsolver.com), she left her native Kentucky to attend DePauw University in Indiana, where she majored in biology.  In the 1980s, she pursued graduate studies in biology and ecology at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where she received a Master of Science degree.  Her understanding of ecology is evident in Prodigal Summer.   

Besides this admirable factual basis, the book is just a plain good read.  I do have some criticisms, though.  Deanna Wolfe, defender of Clinch Mountain, tumbles—practically upon meeting—into bed with a man almost young enough to be her son, ends up getting pregnant, and allows the erstwhile father to wander away to his next adventure.  Good grief—these times demand “safe sex.”   

Also, I don’t think “Predators” did a good job with the dichotomy between locals who hunt (or poach) on the mountain and the outside interests who want to “preserve nature” so they can just see it as the drive down the highway.  There is an enormous chasm between what the locals may want and need, and what taxpayers who live thousands of miles away may want and need.  Kingsolver doesn’t paint a realistic picture in this respect.  

I can rightly be accused of many things:  being focused on the issues of the West and the rural landscape; reading only the writers I really like and not venturing past page 3 of those who don’t share my sensibilities of the natural world; being geo-centric and probably age-centric (how did everybody get to be so young?) but I can’t be accused of not liking a good read.  And so, I recommend Prodigal Summer to everyone else who finds themselves in that last category, too.  

Change in the American West. Exploring the Human Dimension presents 19 “serious” writers who try to make sense out of the day-to-day lives of those of us who work, live in, or love the West, and who discuss why this region is different now than it used to be.  This relatively small (250 page) volume includes some poetry, a short story, and several personal essays, but many pieces are factual articles focused on the goal of looking at “some individual elements and events” that have led to the West we now know.  The tone of the book was immediately set for me by the inscription from the flyleaf: 

As the ancient bird,

the halcyon,

calmed the waters

in the face of winter gales

so can the humanities

calm our fears and launch

us on our quest.   

The Editor’s Note offers a brief, compelling synopsis of each of the entries.  These include:  “Basque American Identity:  Past Perspectives and Future Prospects”; “Inside the Glitter:  Portraits of Workers in Nevada’s Casino Industry”; and “Wisecracking Glen Canyon Dam:  Revisioning Environmental Mythology,” among others.   

While this book does not offer light entertainment, you can read it to see how others, especially nonscientists, view the work we do in the applied sciences—forestry, range, water, wildlife biology, or fisheries.  Change in the American West is thought-provoking.  Any effort needed to “get” the pieces in this book will be well worth it.