Prodigal Summer
by Barbara Kingsolver
HarperCollins

Good things come in threes. Barbara Kingsolver's ambitious triple narrative in her latest novel, "Prodigal Summer," displays an unself-conscious finesse. The three-in-one story tracks an intellectual Palestinian/Jewish woman living on her new husband's traditional family farm; a reclusive wildlife biologist who finds her first real human contact (and wow, is there contact) after living alone in a forest cabin for years; and an aging blowhard on a quest to revive the blight-stricken American chestnut tree.

They're an unlikely triumvirate, and that's where Kingsolver's inveterate skill as an author comes in. Isolated in their own alternating chapters, the characters interact with each other only fleetingly. And until the last chapter, Kingsolver pulls it together with nonchalant grace.

The novel's backdrop is the lush forest and farmland of southern Appalachia, where the residents' relationships to the land they inhabit play out in striking scenes. All three are addressing the familiar civilization vs. nature controversy; Kingsolver clearly shows her side of the debate — "learn to live in symbiosis with nature, it was here first" — as opposed to the "humans are the top of the food chain, we're supposed to be in charge" side.

"There's no such thing as alone," Deanna (the wildlife biologist) says to Eddie Bondo, a hunter half her age who has wandered into her cabin in the woods and become mixed up in her solitary life. "That animal was going to do something important in its time — eat a lot of things, or be eaten. There's all these connected things you're about to blow a hole in. They can't all be your enemy, because one of those connected things is you."

The message is clearly distilled. Critics who look down on Kingsolver for not being subtle admittedly have a point, but they are also are missing the mark by condemning her for it. Just as it's unfair to dismiss a story as fluff because it's entertaining, it's unfair to dismiss a story as preachy or schoolmarm-ish because it has an obvious message. This honesty gives the book added weight — it should be taken seriously because Kingsolver takes her message seriously.

"Prodigal Summer" is dominated by that message and its various permutations. The curmudgeon (it's not surprising she chooses an older, traditional man rather than one of the liberal, younger women to represent this point of view) begins the novel firmly ensconced on the opposite side. Although he comes off looking a little foolish, Kingsolver takes care not to paint him as a villain.

All the characters have their say about the role of reproduction and offspring, the biological drive to continue the genetic line. There is a lot of sex in this novel, something that was absent from Kingsolver's previous works such as "Animal Dreams" and "The Bean Trees," which were somewhat more restrained. Again, Kingsolver parallels the civilized and natural worlds, as when Deanna Wolfe observes a moth trapped against a window in her log cabin:

"She went to the window and pulled back the curtain gently, sending the disturbed moth back into its frenetic charge at the glass. On the curtain it had left a double row of tiny eggs, as neat as a double-stitched seam. It made Deanna sad to see such a last, desperate stab at survival. She'd read that some female moths could mate with many different males, save up all their sperm packets, and then, by some incomprehensible mechanism, choose among them after the boys were long gone — actually deciding whose sperm would fertilize the eggs as she laid them."

The only problematic aspect of Kingsolver's three-stranded approach is her endings. Endings are supposed to bring a story together, but that's inherently problematic when the whole point of a novel is that its parts are separate. Kingsolver decides to employ a sort of fourth perspective in the last chapter, which seems forced and unfortunately ends an excellent novel with a flourish that may leave the reader feeling dissatisfied.

All in all, Kingsolver does an admirable job with a challenging subject matter in a challenging form without making it seem like much of an effort at all. To offset the complicated plot line, Kingsolver sticks to a simple, straightforward style that leaves room for her message — that personal interconnectedness is quieter than, but obviously integral to, the primary one of the natural world's interconnectedness.

Kingsolver's firmness and single-mindedness are admirable. It's good to see a novelist who creates believable, interesting characters that offer up her own convictions in a multitude of forms, and Kingsolver refuses to beat around the bush. The bush, after all, is just as interconnected as any of us.

— Gwen Glazer (grglazer at netscape dot net)