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“I am a big Kingsolver fan, but I was disappointed how this one dragged in the domestic life of its main character and the didactic themes about the impact of global warming on nature and about rural folk who deny its reality.
One could call this a character study about a woman in her late twenties, Dellarobbia, trapped in an unfulfilling sheep ranching life in rural Appalachian Tennessee. She was headed for college when she got pregnant at 17 and compromised her dreams by marrying Cub. He is sweet, but simple, content to haul gravel and carry out chores for his parents, who own the ranch. Dellarobbia’s main pleasures are from raising her young kids, working with the sheep, and half-hearted attempts to start affairs with men she gets crushes on.
Things change when she discovers a phenomenon in the woods that reflects an adverse impact of global warming and scientists come to investigate it. She gets involved with helping them, which creates conflicts within the community and with Cub’s family, which plans to clear cut the woods. I have to treat the nature of the “phenomenon” as a spoiler, though it quickly becomes clear beginning around page 50.
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She discovers the woods are filled with millions of monarch butterflies. But at first she experiences them as some strange fire in the woods that provides some sort of mystical warning about something alien happening to the natural environment. This misapprehension is apparently meant to serve as a metaphor about human blindness over the effects of global warming, but for narrative drama it fell flat for me. The butterflies soon become a tourist attraction and seen as some sort of benediction by the local religious community. A scientist who comes to investigate, Ovid, clarifies how floods in their winter resting grounds in Mexico have somehow led them to choose the highland woods near the farm as a new terminus for migration. Ovid’s message about how the change typifies the many unpredictable impacts of global warming falls on deaf ears in the local community. The threat of them becoming extinct if the woods are logged or if they freeze from a cold snap is what drives the scientists to study the phenomenon. Dellarobbia befriends Ovid, talks her family into accommodating their stay at the farm to carry out research, and takes on a job as an assistant.
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Dellarobbia’s support of the scientists opens her mind to her potential for meaningful work and a pathway out of her dependent conditions and narrow life horizon. It was great to experience her progressive flowering and the resolution she attains at the end. However, there was too much tedium along the way: her crushes, her perpetual thrifty shopping, her encounters with louts and hicks, her continual sneaking around about her smoking, her states of wonder over nature, and comic relief that didn’t do the trick. Kingsolver's efforts in portraying family dynamics and moral issues were much more rewarding with The Bean Trees and The Poisonwood Bible, and the theme of man’s discordance with nature was explored more successfully in The Prodigal Summer (which dealt with wolves).
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Michael E wrote this review Thursday, January 10, 2013.
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