FICTION
“Flight Behavior”
Barbara Kingsolver
HarperCollins, $28.99, 448 pages
It’s hard to think of any contemporary writer who does a better job than Barbara Kingsolver of marrying fiction to the political: Native-American adoption in “The Bean Trees,” mining rights in “Animal Dreams,” colonialism and U.S. foreign policy in “The Poisonwood Bible,” the plight of the urbanized coyote in “Prodigal Summer,” and most recently, McCarthyism in 2009’s “Lacuna.”
Following in those footsteps, “Flight Behavior,” Kingsolver’s 14th book, offers a master class in climate change through its impact on the kind of rural community most vulnerable to its effects and the least likely to recognize it. As in her previous work, the lessons are so tightly woven into the story that every scene, every sentence, relays a part of the message, charting connections between subject and characters to emphasize one of her core themes: Everything is interrelated.
For the many conversations between the natural and the divine, the familiar and the unknown, “God’s will” and science that take place in “Flight Behavior’s” classroom — tiny Feathertown, Tenn. — main character Dellarobia Turnbow is the ideal go-between and a most willing student.
Whip smart and rebellious, fascinated by nature and science, Dellarobia has a hard time swallowing her Bible-belt community’s one-size-fits-all answer for everything: “The Lord works in mysterious ways.” Though she once planned for college, a high-school pregnancy locked her into a dull-as-dishwater marriage at 17 with local farm boy, Cub Turnbow, and now, swamped with the care of two small children, she buries what’s missing in her life under serial flirtations with local heartthrobs.
As the story opens, Dellarobia is on the verge of taking one of those casual flings much further, headed for a mountain cabin and a potentially home-wrecking rendezvous with her crush du jour, when what looks like a raging forest fire blocks her route. But this is no ordinary fire: “This consternation swept the mountains in perfect silence … no smoke, no crackling howl.”
Reminding her of Moses’ burning bush, the sight of the glowing forest — which she doesn’t realize yet is a biological event — seems both personal and transcendent. “Unearthly beauty had appeared to her, a vision of glory to stop her in the road. For her alone these orange boughs lifted, these long shadows became a brightness rising. It looked like the inside of joy, if a person could see that…. It had to mean something.”
Whatever it portends, the sight turns her right back around to her husband and kids, as well as the crushing boredom of life on his family farm, under the iron thumb of his tyrannical father, Bear, and overbearing mother, Hester. Neither Dellarobia nor Cub have any say-so in the farm’s affairs, the most recent of which is Bear’s plan to clear-cut the timber on the mountain behind their home, even though it could have disastrous environmental effects.
But Dellarobia’s fiery vision changes everything. “Something had gotten into her…. The arguments she’d always swallowed like a daily ration of pebbles had begun coming into her mouth and leaping out like frogs.” Silent no more, she protests the deforestation that might rescue her father-in-law from foreclosure, and finds an unexpected ally in her mother-in-law, who sees the mountaintop “miracle” as “the Lord’s business.”
When a small cadre of biologists arrive to study the phenomenon, Dellarobia, hired on to help with cataloging data, becomes infatuated with the lead scientist, a strikingly tall, good-looking man with the improbable name of Ovid Byron. Unlike her other flirtations, this one — in one of many echoes of the book’s title — will follow a different flight pattern.
Dellarobia is one of Kingsolver’s most appealing characters to date, her frustrations, twists and turns a familiar line of defense to anyone who’s tried to keep a marriage going past its due date. Yet despite walls that have long-ago closed in, her outlook is compassionate, combining tolerance and affection for her self-righteous in-laws; her best friend since childhood, Dovey; and the two children that tumble around her like puppies
Kingsolver extends the same treatment to the residents of Feathertown, portraying them with dignity, humor and insight, even when their most important conversations take place in dollar and second-hand stores, kitchens and sheep-shearing barns.
Indeed, one of the most intriguing questions Kingsolver poses in “Flight Behavior” is whether hard science underpins the farming community’s homespun wisdom, hinting at layers of knowledge that link the two. The college students working under Ovid may be highly skilled research aides, but they’re in awe of Dellarobia’s sewing skills. Ovid may be a climate-control expert, but what of Hester, a self-taught sheep breeder whose encyclopedic knowledge about wild plants, their healing properties and where to find them eventually intersects with Ovid’s field?
In “Flight Behavior,” Kingsolver again proves to be our finest poet of the commonplace. By revealing the sacredness in the everyday and bringing the scientific down to recognizable earth, she closes the distance between this insular community and the larger world to show that if we don’t learn to work together, we could lose both.
