Barbara Kingsolver’s “Prodigal Summer” has drawings of moths on the inside cover, lots of plant descriptions and nature-loving characters such as a wildlife biologist and an organic farmer.
To those who subsist on contemporary urban novels and their steady diet of hopelessly lonely thirtysomethings, office romances, drunken phone calls, eating disorders and thinly disguised famous people, that could be a recipe for boredom.
But even the most avid corporate ladder-climber can savor Kingsolver’s lively, lovely latest, a refreshing reminder there’s a natural order that doesn’t have interns at the bottom.
Hunted coyotes, extinct American chestnut trees and even snakes are the protagonists in this tortured, twisted love story between people and their planet, set in Zebulon Mountain in southern Appalachia.
The enemies are hunters, pesticides and other things that mess with nature.
As in Kingsolver’s other novels, such as “Poisonwood Bible,” nothing is ever simple. Biologist Deanna Wolfe devotes her life to saving the mountain’s predatory coyotes, for example, but she’s perfectly happy to kill turkeys, because they’re not as vital to the food chain, or feral cats, because they interfere.
“I don’t love animals as individuals . . . I love them as a whole species,” she tells her mysterious new lover Eddie Bondo – a coyote hunter, of all things, who doesn’t quite see things that way. Fortunately, the heat from their arguments spills over into their bedroom.
There’s a lot of heat between the unlikeliest pairings of humans in this book. At the end of this novel, which is as satisfying as a country weekend, we discover all the characters in this wonderful little world are loosely connected. And so is everyone else, Kingsolver suggests.
“Solitude is a human presumption,” she writes. “Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot, a tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate and predator to prey, a beginning or an end.”
In other words, think twice before stomping on that roach – he could be someone’s dinner.