Home »
Barbara Kingsolver informs my world
Book Review
By Derryll White
Kingsolver, Barbara (1993). Pigs In Heaven.
New or old, it is always a delight to open a Barbara Kingsolver book. I never know where she may take me but, novel or essay, I always trust there will be uncommon sensitivity of person and love and reverence of the natural world. She also shapes feelings between people in a way that reaches out, touches and includes the reader in the story’s emotional journey. Kingsolver is always crystal-clear with her dialogue, offering windows into the minds and souls of the characters she so brilliantly builds.
One of the themes I hear strongly in ‘Pigs In Heaven’ is what is motherhood? Kingsolver, a mother herself, hints that it is past birthright, past love and understanding. It is in fact belief – unquestioning, total, all-consuming belief in that person you mother or call mother. I, of course, am not a mother and I know being a father is something different – but I understand the author as she makes complete sense to me on this issue.
Something else that comes through is Kingsolver’s debunking of TV. “Nobody sees the back. That’s the secret of TV – you only have to worry about what shows up front, your back can be a mess,” says Oprah Winfrey’s wardrobe woman.
The author’s scientific training shines through in her writing. She sees the natural world, understands it and brings it forward to illustrate human emotion and need. She has the type of scientific mind so treasured in education – observant, communicative and constantly delighted by how the natural world transforms her life.
Barbara Kingsolver’s writing style is unique. She brings the sensitivity of the best social worker to the page, blends that with the soul of someone who cares deeply about the world we live in, and garnishes it all with her compelling scientific curiosity. A story about an adopted Indian child becomes an insightful probe of contemporary American life. And all is accomplished with a delightful sense of humour.
This is a wonderful book with some very sad and heartbreaking undertones. So many times while reading it I thought “Man, you could substitute Ktunaxa for Cherokee and understand a whole lot more than most East Kootenay people do now.” This is definitely one of the reasons I continue to read Barbara Kingsolver – she informs my world. She also speaks directly to why I have a red button on my pack that exhorts “Kill your TV.”
In the end this marvelous story asks one-and-all to step outside themselves, outside the law, and listen to their hearts. Kingsolver gently shows that hearts can inform minds, and decisions can be made that address individual needs within a large community context. Every single person would benefit from reading ‘Pigs In Heaven,’ and they would enjoy themselves tremendously while doing so. Kingsolver remains near the top of my all-star reading list.
********
Excerpts from the novel:
PHOTOS – Turtle’s photos tend to come out fairly hopeless in terms of composition: cutoff legs or all sky, or sometimes something Taylor never even saw at the time. When the pictures come back from the drugstore she often gets the feeling she’s gone on someone else’s vacation.
TELEVISION – She hates television, and not just because her husband left her for one; she hates it on principle. It’s like the boy who cried wolf, spreading crazy ideas faster than you can find out what’s really up. If people won’t talk to each other, they shouldn’t count on strangers in suits and makeup to give them the straight dope.
DIFFERENCES – Lucky leans so eagerly over his mashed potatoes that Taylor has to look away. This must be what people dislike about the retarded: they get straight down to the animal business of life, revealing it for what it is.
WOMEN – She’s the first woman he’s ever known who doesn’t give a damn how she looks, or is completely happy with the way she looks, which amounts to the same thing. Usually women are aware of complex formulas regarding how long the legs should be in relation to the waist in relation to the eyelashes – a mathematics indecipherable to men but strangely crucial to women. Taylor apparently never took the class.
MEMORY – Gabe, her roommate in the before-life, who followed her out the birth door and right through childhood. Sweet Gabe, who was stolen from the family and can’t find his way home. She holds the photo as close as her eyes will focus, and drinks the frightening liquor of memory….
UNDERSTANDING – This ordinary man in jeans, whose thoughts she believed she knew, opens his mouth and becomes a foreigner. It occurs to her that this one thing about people you can never understand well enough; how entirely inside themselves they are.
SCIENCE – Jax is crying. He feels deeply confused about whom he should blame for his losses. The predator seems to be doing only what she has to do. In natural systems there is no guilt or virtue, only success or failure, measured by survival and nothing more. Time is the judge. If you manage to pass on what you have to the next generation, then what you did was right.
LOVE – “I don’t want anyone here to die,” she tells her at last.
Boma blinks. “It’s a big tribe. Somebody’s always dying.”
Sugar looks at the people gathered in this single green place and understands the price of love.
RESERVATION BLUES – It looks like everybody here has been out of work for the last 40 years, and in fact Sugar says that’s about right. In the past, she claims the eastern end of the state was a reservation, and fairly prosperous. But the federal government cut up the land into small packets and gave one to each family, since the people here had no thoughts of land as something to be given or taken permanently they were persuaded by clever investors to trade their allotment papers for a mule or a stove or, in one case Sugar knows of, a crate of peaches and a copy of The Leatherstocking Tales. Since then, most of eastern Oklahoma has been more or less looking for a job.
RELATIONSHIPS – Alice breathes a little deeper. Sympathizing over the behavior of men is the baking soda of women’s friendships, it seems, the thing that makes them bubble and rise.
HEAVEN – Alice feels herself relax, looking at the water. Bright orange dragonflies zip low and dive and stab their tales at their own reflections, then light in the rushes, transforming all that energy into perfect stillness. The sunlight reflected upward from the water lights the underside of Sugar’s and Alice’s faces and the broad hickory leaves above them, as if they’re all on a stage. “I can see why you call it Heaven,” she says.
CHEROKEE NATION – “What’s happened to us is that our chain of caretaking got interrupted. My mom’s generation.” Annawake feels her stomach harden. “Federal law put them in boarding school. Cut off their hair, taught them English, taught them to love Jesus, and made them spend their entire childhood in a dormitory. They got to see their people maybe twice a year. Family has always been our highest value, but that generation of kids never learned how to be in a family. The past got broken off.”
TELEVISION – “Well, I had me one [a husband], Harland, but he never talked. It was like trying to have a conversation with an ironing board. He just wanted to watch TV all the time. That’s what ruint him, really. I think TV does all the talking for you and after a while you forget how to hold up your end.”
MEDICINE – “They do that, now. Put new hearts and livers and stuff in people,” Alice points out.
“I know, but that don’t seem right, trading parts with dead folks just to keep yourself around, pestering the younguns. When you’re wore out, I’d say that’s a sure sign it’s time to go.”
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.