As a biologist, Barbara Kingsolver sees human beings as a small part of the natural order. As a novelist, she foregrounds the individual Suzie Mackenzie Recently, Barbara Kingsolver told her publishers she would continue to do book tours and readings only if these took place in halls of no less than 500 people and if the money raised were donated to a local environmental cause. In this way she could feel she was being useful, “and not simply parading around saying ‘Look at me’.”
Naturally, the publishers concurred. Kingsolver is a best-selling author who deals with big themes. Her last novel, The Poisonwood Bible, was already a best-seller when it was taken up by Oprah Winfrey’s book club and sold another two million copies. “It reached a whole different readership,” she says. “Women who watch TV in the afternoon.” Her latest book, Prodigal Summer (Faber & Faber), has already made its way on to best-seller lists in the United States.
So the citizens of Chicago, Michigan, Milwaukee, Baltimore, North Carolina, and that was just one week, had their consciousness raised. In Tucson, where she lives, hundreds of dollars were donated in one evening to help save the Sonoma desert. And the publishers got to sell their books. Put like this, it sounds like a clever mixture of piety and calculation. But it is, as Kingsolver, a former biologist, would recognise, the perfect biological fix. It furthers the species in this case the novelist through the individual, while recognising, in the overall scheme of things, the individual’s relative insignificance. “I am not here just to blow my own horn,” as Kingsolver says.
She has never bought “the ridiculous myth” of individualism, Kingsolver says. “At school, all the heroes we were taught to admire were the solo fliers, like Lindbergh or Edison. It’s the national religion of America the self-made man who depends on no one.” It is also the great human arrogance, she says, “to think we are the most important thing; and not only that, to act as if we are the only thing”, when it’s obvious that we are part of the animal chain and subject to other laws than we think we are.
But what has made us the most successful animal on the planet is precisely individualism. It may be an illusion, but it’s a pretty effective driving force. Kingsolver the scientist can stand outside and see humans as just another species; the novelist writes from the inside, where human beings can’t be seen as just another life swarm and where emotions and motivations matter.
In the small rural Kentucky town where she grew up, the idea that one could be a writer was risible. Her father was the local doctor; her mother “was his wife”. Interdependence, mutual support systems, was the governing ethic. Elsewhere, outside this framework, it was a story of cock-up, misery, misunderstanding. Teenage pregnancies, wife beating. “Limited possibilities, limited hope.”
She both loved and hated Kentucky. A community in which individualism was discouraged forged her individualism. “I grew up aware of all the people I depended on and who depended on me.” The great thing about small-town life, she has often said, is that everybody knows your business. “And the bad thing about small-town life is that everybody knows your business … I suppose that is my central obsession. What we owe to society, what we owe to ourselves.”
She had to move on. At DePauw University in Indiana, she found a community of like-minded people and “a sense of obligation about fixing things that were wrong. The wider world I’d been looking for.” She never went back to her home town.
After university she headed for Europe, working on archaeological digs, living in a commune. For the first time, she says, she was able to see the USnot as it sees itself but as how it is seen “from the outside”. Europe gave her a new perspective: “[Europeans] are far less wasteful, more resourceful. Here, we are still pioneers. We arrive, we use up, we move on in a national spirit of ‘when this is done, there will be more’, we’ll just keep moving west. Well, this is west. You have to stop somewhere.” After a couple of years, she returned to the USand headed for Tucson to work as a biologist at the University of Arizona. Tucson is a strangely ambivalent place: an urban sprawl of a million inhabitants dropped into the dramatic beauty of a desert. Here, two kinds of brutal isolation collide, natural and cultural. The uniform quality of the desert landscape seems to mirror the barren loneliness of a city that has no centre. Yet, like the desert, it is quietly alive hardy, resourceful, full of life.
As a junior lab technician at the university Kingsolver observed the difference between urban poverty and rural poverty. “At home, growing up, we weren’t really poor. We had everything we needed, we just didn’t have what we wanted. Now, in the city, I understood for the first time what it is to go without what you need.”
Tucson is less than 100km from the Mexican border. “It was a time when the US was waging covert war in Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador. Refugees were fleeing American bombs and being stopped at the border. It seemed so hypocritical that America was opening its arms to refugees from China, from Cuba, and yet these people trying to escape our bombs were turned back.” She joined with many others in offering refuge, helping people establish new identities, finding them homes. “The sanctuary movement began here.”All her first friends in Tucson were from this refugee community. In self-imposed exile from one world, she found herself part of another. And she learned what has become central to her moral vision: “That a lot of the time human laws are wrong, simply put in place to serve economics.”
After a few years in Tucson, she got married, and had a daughter. Ten years later, she had another daughter, with her second husband. She doesn’t teach her children to believe in God, but she accepts, she says, the value of religion. “I used to think religion was just more of the same thing. Dump responsibility on the Big Guy. Now I see an importance in that. It’s a relief to accept that not everything is under your control.” When her children ask her what happens when we die, she tells them that we become compost, “that our molecules are reconfigured as a tree. That is our heaven and it seems to work pretty well for us.”
By 1983, Kingsolver had left the university and begun working as a freelance journalist, mostly for scientific journals. “I discovered it was an open market for anyone who could understand the language of science but write about it in another language.”
One weekend she set out across southern Arizona to cover a series of copper mine strikes. Over 18 months, while the strike lasted (it was ultimately defeated), she conducted interviews with the women who were left behind in these towns while the men were off elsewhere seeking an income. Kingsolver spent so much time there she became “that gal writing the book”. “So that is what I had to do. They were counting on me.”
Holding the Line is the story of these women, women normally so submissive that they would not leave home without their husband’s permission, but who were now holding the line against Arizona’s National Guard, handling the day-to-day running of the strike.
The book became a study in transformation from passivity to powerfulness. “The women’s transformation affected every aspect of their lives, their relationships with their husbands, their children, with me.” It was a frankly biased, non-fictional account; when she submitted it to the first publisher, she was told, “Sorry but we don’t accept novels.” It wasn’t a version of the truth that they could accept.
Her writing is often described by critics as “female”, by which she thinks they mean “a feminine sensibility”. “It’s not as though I have no men in my books. But I examine support systems, not the lone hero. I am interested in how everything works together.” Solitude, she says, is a human presumption. “Or, dare I say it, a male presumption.”
She wrote her first novel, The Bean Trees, at night in a closet. She was pregnant, living with her husband in a tiny house, and he couldn’t sleep if she had the light on. The day she went into labour she heard it had been accepted for publication. “So the significance of it kind of passed me by.” But the money she earned gave her enough to write her next book. And so on, until Pigs in Heaven and then The Poisonwood Bible provided financial stability.
She begins a book, she says, with themes. “I know some writers begin with character and plot; I invent characters to serve my theme.” Her theme is essentially her culture, its history, and making sense of its place in the world. She remains, she says, both committed to and despairing of the US. “I take responsibility for where I am in the world and part of that is being a citizen of the US, which has done many shameful things and many great things. As a writer, it is my job to encourage people to own up to the less pleasant realities of our legacy.”
In The Poisonwood Bible, a profoundly ambitious book set in the Belgian Congo as it comes to independence, she asks the question: How do I live in a country that did these things to Africa? A country that assassinated the elected leader Patrice Lumumba and replaced him with Mobutu Sese Seko, a puppet dictator? She is not preaching. Misplaced, or misdirected, zeal is also the book’s subject on the large scale in the political world, and on the small scale in the personal world of the thundering Baptist missionary who drags his family to Africa to convert the natives. He believes that everyone can be converted, but he is wrong, and the pursuit of salvation becomes his damnation.
The massive success of The Poisonwood Bible after its publication in 1998 changed very little in her personal life, she says. She has never been interested in money, and now gives most of it away, “far more than I keep”. Her personal world had already undergone a dramatic transformation when, eight years ago, she met Steven Hopp, an ornithologist and sometime jazz musician. They spent one evening together talking, and then a year speaking to each other nightly on the telephone. “When we finally did get together, we used to have to sit with our hands covering our eyes, we were so unused to each others’ physical presence.” There is something so sensual in this image and it is this eroticism and delight in sensuality that filters through her new book, Prodigal Summer.
It is a strange book. She knew as she was writing it, she says, that it might have a rough ride with some critics. “I knew it was much sexier than anything I had written before and that they might have a hard time with that.” Even so, she is surprised by the hostility of some responses. “It’s as though I have done something subversive. That’s to say: this culture has created a convincing illusion that it is in control, but it’s still an illusion; that there are parallels between the natural world and the human world to suggest that the human world is the natural world is too deeply threatening to the self-importance of the urbane.”
It was a shock, she says, to realise that a lot of people found it easier to accept the intricate politics of the Congo than this fairly straightforward biological parable set in the Appalachian mountains. In it, Deanna, a 45-year-old naturalist, lives a solitary life in the mountains among the animals she is paid to preserve until the sudden arrival of a man who awakens her animal, fundamentally biological, desires. Kingsolver says she never writes about herself. “I feel like I have to put a banner on the front of my books saying, ‘This is not me. These are not my parents.'” It’s a bit disingenuous this, and a bit over-emphatic. If what she is saying is that we, as humans, as individuals, have to recognise we are not supremely important, then it is at the level of the individual that we grasp this point.
And there’s a certain self-importance in saying that the importance of the message is to grasp that we are not important. Individualism may even be nature’s cleverest trick. To put it another way: animals don’t write books.