Poverty and butterflies in Appalachia

Flight Behavior

By Barbara Kingsolver

HarperCollins. 448 pp. $28.99

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Reviewed by Judith Musser

For fans of Barbara Kingsolver's fiction, Flight Behavior will be a pleasant return to a familiar setting with recognizable characters, memorable dialogue, common themes, and well-written prose that has become associated with a Kingsolver novel.

As in Prodigal Summer, Kingsolver revisits Appalachia and re-creates a plot imbued with ecological and biological importance. Like The Poisonwood Bible, the strengths and limitations of a strongly fundamentalist religious community are represented.

Taylor from The Bean Trees, that independent female escapee of small-town life, reappears with vigor as Dellarobia, the main character in Flight Behavior. Codi from Animal Dreams and Dellarobia both suffer through miscarriages. The plot machinations of a secretive parentage that were foundational in Pigs in Heaven are used again in Flight Behavior. Border-crossing issues with Mexico (in the form of the migration of butterflies and the immigration of a Mexican family in Flight Behavior) are reminiscent of the backdrop of Kingsolver's last novel, The Lacuna.

Yes, those readers who enjoy themes incorporating social justice, environmental concerns, strong female characters, and reliable science will thoroughly enjoy the rich narrative, snarky humor, interesting characters, and thematic elements of Kingsolver's ninth novel.

The novel begins in flight. Dellarobia, a smart, funny 27-year-old mother of two young children, caught in a mundane marriage, surrounded by domineering in-laws, regulated by a religious community, and constrained by her family's poverty, seeks at least a momentary respite in an affair with a younger man. On her journey up the mountain to consummate her escape, she is confronted with a spectacular phenomenon of nature - millions of monarch butterflies. They literally metamorphose her life.

In fact, she is the only character who transforms in the novel. Cub, her husband, remains the hardworking yet banal and subservient son; Hester, her mother-in-law, has moments of softening but will continue to be the domineering female; Bear Turnbow, her father-in-law, never really changes his mind about his desire to log the mountain; and even the community of Feathertown seems, in the end, unchanged by the global attention and events that fly into their midst.

Readers, however, will most likely leave this novel with not only a better understanding of the effects of global warming, but also a new insight into the challenges facing the farming families of Appalachia.

For readers new to Kingsolver's fiction, this novel offers various attractions. For those with a literary bent, the author offers plenty of crafty allusions to Shakespeare, poets, artists, and the classics. There are countless references to flight, and Kingsolver manipulates the conceit of rebirth in various ways (the chrysalis, lambing season, water imagery, names, and even an acknowledgment of the redemptive aspects of the Internet).

For readers steeped in the Hebrew Bible, various connections to Moses, Noah, Job, and the prophets Jeremiah and Elijah will be noted. Readers will enjoy the humor in the verbal and texting communications between Dellarobia and her bff Dovey. The science community will appreciate Kingsolver's representation of good science in the Harvard-educated biologist/lepidopterist (Dr. Ovid Byron) who comes to study the butterflies on the Turnbow mountain. Even readers who are not of the conservative bent will be pleased to see Kingsolver's stabs at late-night comedy figures such as Stephen Colbert and Northeasterners who chastise the Midwestern community in one broad sweep.

In fact, it seems the antagonists in the novel are not the logging companies, or the left- and right-wing politicians, or the Bible-thumping preachers, or the global-warming skeptics; the adversaries are embodied in the deceptive maneuvers of the media and the short attention span of a populace that prefers to consume sound bites.

For example, Tina Ultner, a local TV news reporter, attempts to interview Byron in his makeshift lab in the Turnbow barn. The interview isn't going smoothly, and Tina voices her frustration:

"The station has gotten about five hundred e-mails about these butterflies, almost all favorable. Is this really where you want to go with this segment? Because I think you're going to lose your audience."

Byron replies, "I am a scientist. Are you suggesting I change my answer to improve your ratings? . . . You are letting a public relations firm write your scripts for you. The same outfit that spent a decade manufacturing doubts for you about the smoking-and-cancer contention. Do you people never learn? It's the same damned company, Tina, the Advancement of Sound Science. Look it up, why don't you. They went off the Philip Morris payroll and into the Exxon pocket. . . . You have no interest in real inquiry. You are doing a two-step with your sponsors."

Some readers will cheer for Byron in this exchange; other readers may roll their eyes at the overt political leanings and Kingsolver's nonoe-too- subtle authorial intrusions that can become preachy.

I confess, I cheered.