January 9, 2015
At one point during my winter break, I hit up Half-Priced Books and picked up a few new books for the fancy bookcase my dad got me for Christmas (hint-bombs work). This was one of them. This is the third Kingsolver work I've read, the second novel and, I think, her best-known.
The cover of the edition I own has a snippet of a review from the New York Times Book Review. It calls this a "Southern novel taken west," and I agreed, but not necessarily in a good way. Some elements made it seem like stereotypical Southern chick-lit. You have:
-A protagonist from modest circumstances
-Women and children who are displaced/in distressed
-A quirky and benevolent middle-aged mother figure, a woman who is just too good (and who probably doesn't have kids of her own)
-Some degree of eccentric Christianity
-A sense of homely comfort that could be shaken any time
You've read that book; I have at least a couple of times. But using this familiar framework, there are some worthwhile elements in this story. The main plot revolves around Turtle, a young Cherokee girl who is foisted onto Taylor (the protagonist; I felt like I'd met her before, too) as she's traveling from her home in Middle-of-Nowhere, Kentucky to wherever she happens to end up. In her early 20s, fed up but also scared of her life in her small town, she takes off to seek adventure. She and Turtle end up in Tucson.
Funny how the last book I read about Kingsolver had her leaving Tucson with her family to head back east. There were definitely signs of Kingsolver's vegetable love in this book. The first words that previously-catatonic Turtle says around Taylor are names of vegetables. Mattie, the already-described mother figure to Taylor, is able to maintain a garden in brutally hot Tucson. And Taylor isn't completely satisfied with the desert; when she's back in Oklahoma, at the Lake o' the Cherokees, she reflects on how her soul had been thirsty in the desert.
Now, Taylor finds a happy home in Tucson with housemate Lou Ann, a fellow Kentuckian whose husband abandoned her when she was seven months pregnant with their son. She has a job at Mattie's tire shop, and even assists her in helping immigrants get away from the border. But it's sad to me that she left her mother. They'd had a good relationship, and while I realize that Taylor had to leave to even have Turtle come into her life, I don't know...is she really all that much better off? I guess I didn't fully get why Taylor left her hometown to end up in Tucson. She has ties there now, but she had ties at home, too. She was on track to become a legitimate X-Ray technician, but in Tucson she's, well, a tire jockey. Not bad, but is it better?
I guess I just didn't connect with the characters in this book. But something else bothered me, too. There's definitely a "men are scum" vibe here. Angel, Lou Ann's husband, is a self-pitying asshole. Taylor grew up without a dad because her father abandoned her mom while she was pregnant. Worst of all, Turtle was molested before Taylor got her; the aunt who handed her niece off through Taylor's glass-less car window was protecting her, possibly from her own husband. And the only prominent make character is Estavan, one of the immigrants whom Mattie helps. He was the perfect man who sometimes shows up in those Southern novels: handsome, well-educated, mild-mannered. And while Taylor, of course, falls for him, there's un problema: he's married, and not really interested in her in that way, anyway. His wife Esperanza is sweet and pitiable, having lost many friends and had her child taken from her. These two were probably the best characters in the book. But other than Estavan, there are hardly any men central to the plot. I'm pretty indifferent to men personally, but I definitely don't hate them. I believe and know that women are superior to men overall, but I don't think men are monsters. Maybe because I work with troubled young men, and I see how easy it is for such monsters to be created. You know, abuse cycles and all that. Women can be abusive, too, and hateful and monstrous, but I still think that on the whole, women react in less outwardly destructive ways to trauma. I should probably stop here, as I don't want to perpetuate any stereotypes. I get kind of a feel with where Kingsolver's head was at regarding men at the time, being a single mom and all (she must have gotten with Steven Hopp after she wrote this book, though if my math is right, it couldn't have been too long after...). It seemed to me like she projected some bitterness onto young Taylor.
I'm noticing that I tend to not go for Kingsolver's fiction, but I may still check into any other nonfiction she's written. I didn't exactly dislike this book, I just didn't really get into it. For any devotees to Southern chick-lit, this book would be a must-read, especially if they don't go in for romance.
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