It’s not unusual for an established writer to pen a mid-career novel all about sex. (Think John Updike or Nicholson Baker.) What’s striking about “Prodigal Summer” is that Barbara Kingsolver’s preoccupation with coupling never feels gratuitous or pandering. Her lusty birds, bees and baby boomers possess a profound innocence, and their urges animate a wide-ranging discussion of everything from organic farming to reengaging with life.
“Prodigal Summer” consists of three separate stories, each set in southern Appalachia and told in alternating chapters under the titles “Predators,” “Moth Love” and “Old Chestnuts.” In “Moth Love,” Lusa Maluf Landowski marries the youngest and favorite son of the cliquish Widener clan. When Lusa is suddenly widowed, she defies expectations by ignoring the snide remarks of her five sisters-in-law and working the family farm. As Lusa slowly earns the Wideners’ respect, one sister comments on the clubbiness of families: “That’s what Joel said for years after we got married: ‘Going to a Widener get-together is like a gol-dang trip to China.’ Why is that? We don’t seem like anything special to me.”
“Old Chestnuts” is the funniest of the stories and the novel’s ideological engine. Garnett Walker, a cranky conservative, verbally spars with his next-door neighbor, Nannie Rawley, an earthy-crunchy, Unitarian-church-going, Rachel Carson-loving orchard keeper. And in “Predators,” a reclusive wildlife specialist named Deanna Wolfe is enraptured with a den of coyotes, animals reviled on the wooded mountain where she lives. When Eddie Bondo, a man 19 years Deanna’s junior, arrives to hunt the coyotes, the two begin a passionate affair that upends her predictable existence.
Nature’s call is audible throughout Kingsolver’s world. In the opening pages she writes: “Here and now, spring heaved in its randy moment. Everywhere you looked, something was fighting for time, for light, the kiss of pollen, a connection of sperm and egg and another chance.” Sex, the driving force that throws opposites suddenly and intimately together, provides a metaphor for man’s dysfunctional relationship with nature that unifies the three stories and their characters.
In sexual desire, Kingsolver has also found the perfect titillating cover for her often-lampooned polemics on the environment and other lefty standards. Characters argue passionately against man’s heedless meddling with nature (not surprisingly, pesticides and tobacco farming fare badly), but the theories espoused are never squishy. Deanna identifies with the peak of the food chain, preferring predators over pussycats hands down, while Nannie Rawley admits that “cutting a wheat field amounts to more decapitated bunnies under the combine than you’d believe.”
Arriving so soon after Kingsolver’s bestselling “The Poisonwood Bible,” “Prodigal Summer” is bound to look modest in comparison, but it’s no less accomplished. Her crowning achievement is delivering a sunny, emotionally resonant love story while suggesting that Deanna and Eddie are also primitive creatures obeying a biological imperative. Like an MTV video that alternates from seduction scene to microscope slides of sperm rushing toward egg, “Prodigal Summer” cuts between the mating rituals of moths and the overbred sentiments of man and woman. In the final pages, it’s nature that emerges triumphant, a collective consciousness cutting our human preoccupations down to size: “Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot, a tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate and predator to prey, a beginning or an end.”
Friendships are messy experiences that don’t adhere to the fundamental rules of narrative. Romances have neat beginnings (a kiss) and clear endings (usually a kiss-off), but friendships meander — dwindling, reviving, sometimes expiring gradually, without ceremony. Perhaps because friendships are such a free-for-all, we don’t easily recover from the bungled ones. They gnaw at us.
This “terrible haunting” of disrupted relationships is central to Beth Kephart’s heartfelt meditation on the role friendship plays in our lives. She opens “Into the Tangle of Friendship” with an unexpected telephone call from Joanne, her former best friend, the one who taught her about music, menorahs and “the fine art of passing notes in school.” Twenty years ago, Kephart broke with Joanne in a fit of adolescent self-righteousness — after Joanne attended the prom with the blond runner Kephart loved from afar. “I didn’t realize that you can’t make old friends,” Kephart now muses, “that you can only lose them, that in losing them … you walk around with a void inside that you can never adequately explain.”
Kephart’s storytelling avoids the narrowly personal approach that is fashionable in memoirs today. In a likably humble gesture, she includes the viewpoints of friends and favorite writers to bolster her case that all our relationships matter. “This story, I know, is everybody’s story, for the capacity and desire for friendship are scripted right into our genes.”
In this paean to the multiple uses of friendship, Kephart rejoices in how children prepare for painful social situations by role-playing with their buddies. She discusses her otherwise antisocial husband’s lasting friendships with boys he knew back in El Salvador, relationships that confirm the reality of his own childhood memories. And she rhapsodizes over “discrepant friendships,” those often ephemeral connections between adults and children or the middle-aged and the very old.
This book is invigorating and odd, earnest and endearing. The most interesting tales are the least saccharine, the explorations of how “friendship is a benefaction and a weight.” In one of the most powerful vignettes, Kephart turns her attention to the sad plight of Andree, her former neighbor and dear friend. When Andree learns that her husband has terminal cancer, Kephart is unable to bring comfort. “If you think friendship is an organ of convenience, think again: it takes its toll. As we grow older, there will be more of life to take head on or divert or despise or explain.”
Unfortunately, Kephart’s wisdom sometimes suddenly gives way to sentiments so jejune they sound like she has plundered a teenager’s diary. (“What do you think about when no one’s looking? I’ll ask Joanne … And what roots you to this earth, Joanne? And how often do you marvel at the sky?”) Despite many pages of buildup, Kephart’s reunion with her old friend is a disappointment to the reader, a story that fizzles. It’s unclear what these two adults have in common other than a shared relief at no longer being estranged. “We grow too old to lose old friends, and Joanne knows this as well.”
What makes this memoir so lovable, awkward passages notwithstanding, is its radical sunniness. Kephart’s sprightly tone is a departure from the disarming honesty of “A Slant of Sun,” her memoir of struggling to help her only son, Jeremy, who at 2 was diagnosed with a Kafkaesquely nonspecific “pervasive developmental disorder.” The roughest times now behind them (Jeremy overcomes many of his quasi-autistic tendencies and learns to socialize), Kephart savors and celebrates the joys of everyday life that her family has only recently reclaimed.
Fans of “A Slant of Sun” will find the author every bit as ardent and humane this time around. In the end, Kephart succeeds at drawing a stirring picture of our humanity through the prism of her own varied relationships. “What do any of us know about friendship, isn’t that the question here? What can we make of how it changes over time, how it is about wonder at first, then self-definition, then survival, how it is always about comfort, about simply being here, alive?”
Diane
Johnson’s latest version of the
international novel is a clever twist on
the joke “Enough about me. Let’s talk
about what you think of me.” Americans,
she knows, rather than envying the
French their foie gras and Godard,
rarely give them a second thought. But
we are extremely interested in what
those snobbish, stylish Europeans think
of us — of our directness, our money,
our industry and our fashion sense.
In “Le Mariage,” two American expats,
Clara Holly and Tim Nolinger, navigate
the trans-Atlantic divide. Clara is
married to Serge Cray, a reclusive
Polish director, and the couple live
together in a ritzy Parisian suburb
where Clara belongs to the “American
world that exists like a specialized
form in a complex ecosystem, dependent
on its hosts but apart from them.” Tim,
a freelance journalist, is another type
of transplant altogether — marginal,
fluid, opportunistic: “There are a
dozen, or dozens, of Americans like him
in Paris, clinging to the rather
precarious livelihoods they have managed
to score, for the pleasure of being
there or because they have burnt their
bridges and have no idea how to return.”
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The antitheses of the innocents abroad
in a Henry James novel, Johnson’s
Americans in Paris are steeped in the
cultural syntax of both countries — and
powerless to do anything but cynically
observe and snicker. At a wedding party
for Tim and his Parisian fiancée,
Anne-Sophie, Tim is both irritated that
his future mother-in-law has hired a
maid to dispense ice cubes (something
she’s heard Americans inexplicably
adore) and embarrassed that his friends
conform to stereotype by cloddishly
ruining their kir champagnes with ice.
Johnson is a beguiling writer, serving
up catty observations with loopy good
humor. The sharpest social critic in
this novel is Anne-Sophie. Unlike the
other French characters, who believe
Americans are rich and lacking in
subtlety, Anne-Sophie adores everything
American, exclaiming happily about the
tackiest aspects of our mass-market
consumerism. In her exuberance (fast
food, strip malls, Circuit City!) she
points unerringly to all that’s wrong
with the United States.
“Le Mariage” shares with “Le
Divorce,” Johnson’s 1997 bestseller
and a National Book Award finalist, a
subject, a sensibility and a handful of
characters. Each novel is a comedy of
manners, but “Le Divorce” runs out of
steam three-quarters of the way through.
“Le Mariage,” on the other hand,
steadily gains momentum as seemingly
minor threads recur, gaining interest
with age. In one such thread, the Crays
refuse to let hunters onto their
property, defying a French law that
permits your neighbors to shoot
partridges and deer where they will. For
the hunters, the Crays are the
embodiment of American hypocrisy,
representatives of a cavalierly
murderous, gun-happy nation quibbling
over a few dead pheasants. Clara and one
of the hunters fall in love, the grudge
match escalates and law and emotion
collide more brutally with each fresh
contact.
“Le Mariage” is a slight novel but,
within the scope of its modest
ambitions, a near-perfect one. Johnson
is a masterly storyteller who can pull
off a storybook ending — love, joy, a
trip down the aisle — without making us
gag. “To look for happiness was like
looking at the sun during an eclipse.
Not only did the sun disappear, but you
burned your eyeballs too. Yet here,
strangely, unsought for, was happiness.”
The true marriage, of course, is the one
of two cultures, poorly matched and
prone to wild misunderstandings, yet
ineluctably drawn together in a
passionate and lasting embrace.
Everyone knows that a song cover flops when it’s too faithful to the original; imitation becomes interesting only when it ventures into new terrain. By that yardstick (and plenty of others), “Roger Fishbite” is a terrific accomplishment. Emily Prager has written what she describes as a “literary parody” of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” from the nymphet’s perspective, transforming the famous ’50s schoolgirl into a ’90s teenager, a postmodern kid who paraphrases Ricki Lake and Henry Fielding.
What prevents the novel from devolving into an inside joke is the enthralling voice of Lucky Linderhof, who, at nearly 15, tells her tale with the world-weariness befitting an elder statesman of child abuse. Right off, she pegs her mother’s boarder-boyfriend as an oily weirdo, dubbing him “Fishbite” for his cold, unblinking stare. Fishbite, she says, “was not the first grown-up who liked me. They always did.” No innocent, Lucky gives as good as she gets, competing for Fishbite’s attentions with her mother, a raging Sinophile who collects opium pipes and bound-feet shoes — the ultimate in oppression chic. Lucky complains that her mom kowtows to Fishbite: “I think he wants a stronger, more feminist type like me but I’ll have to watch him. Men can be perverse.” The perversity Lucky dreads most, of course, is indifference.
A onetime comedy writer and columnist for the National Lampoon and Penthouse, Prager has hit upon inspired material, a story that’s both expansive enough and zany enough for her offbeat talents. “Roger Fishbite” — a sly mixture of social exposi, riffs on TV talk shows, feminist revision of male-fantasy literature and teenage buddy tale — is the most engaging work she’s come out with since her first story collection, “A Visit From the Footbinder,” was published in 1982. Her sendup of the tony private schools Lucky attends is unparalleled. Each night after dinner at the Chutney School, an anorexia-and-bulimia specialist gives an inspirational lecture to keep the girls from vomiting. Lucky makes it a policy to befriend the war criminals’ children, reasoning that these kids are so darling because their “fathers take all their meanness out on the citizenry.” At times, Prager gets carried away with her own silliness. In the last 50 pages, Lucky forms a political action group called World’s Hapless Infants, Notice Everyone! (WHINE!) to protest the child sex trade in Thailand. As a set piece it’s certainly entertaining, but it digresses too far from the Fishbite plot and the book loses momentum.
In the end, Prager’s novel is a negative of Nabokov’s, dark where his is light and satiric where his is serious. If “Lolita” explores a middle-aged man’s twisted but heartfelt passion for a young girl, “Roger Fishbite” works as black comedy, portraying an indifferent society that destroys its own children. Never is Lucky more affecting than when she lets down her guard and acts like the kid she is. Of her sordid adventures with Fishbite, she writes: “I had not yet reached the age when doing wrong excited me. I’d rather have gone back to school and gotten A’s. I was beginning to do well at geometry and, frankly, I missed it.”
How many serious fiction writers are actually funny? To read reviews, you’d think novelists were laugh riots, stand-up comedians without mikes, but in fact it’s rare to find one who’s anything more than whimsical or maybe droll. Berger is an exception — a writer who can be described without hyperbole as a really funny guy. In “The Return of Little Big Man,” he flaunts his loopy aesthetic in the opening pages by gleefully borrowing a creaky Hollywood convention and resurrecting the centenarian Jack Crabb, who had died at the end of “Little Big Man.” Now 112, bored by nursing home life and still “naturally devious,” Crabb admits he faked his own death to escape an insufficiently generous publishing contract.
Crabb, a name-dropping, self-aggrandizing hustler who’s constantly bluffing his way out of trouble, has an ear for comic turns of phrase. He recounts that after the white men arrived, the Cheyenne began calling themselves “human beings,” the Sioux started referring to Indians as “normal people” and the Lakota christened whites “wasichu,” which means “they won’t go away.” Here’s how Crabb justifies a bout of egregious bragging: “Why boast about anything? Because that’s what Westerners always done when in the presence of them from the East. It was expected of you, you felt you owed it to the landscape, but the real reason was you could get away with it to some tenderfoot who travelled by parlor car and never ate a meal except by knife and fork. And also I was drunk.”
“The Return of Little Big Man” is not without its clunkers. One of Berger’s less subtle attempts at humor, an ongoing deflation of Wild West lore, falls flat because he strings too many incidents together without an overarching design. Although the novel is nominally a western, its weakest moments are its action scenes, like the O.K. Corral shootout, which feel wooden and obligatory. And the one-dimensional character sketches are disappointing: Custer is self-centered, Annie Oakley stingy, Wyatt Earp a jerk. So what? It’s impossible to view Berger’s conceit — a hapless Everyman popping up, virtually unnoticed, at major historical moments — without thinking “Forrest Gump” (even though “Little Big Man” came first).
The complex and sad joke at the heart of Berger’s novel is the selling of the West. When Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show hires Sitting Bull, the old chief’s presence is valued on the most ruthless of economic principles, supply and demand: “Uniqueness,” one character avers, “always commands the highest price.” Sadder still is Sitting Bull’s fate when he leaves show business and returns home, only to be shot and killed by his own people. But Berger, through his windy narrator, avoids sentimentalizing his points. For Crabb, the compensation for hawking one’s memories on the open market is the chance to savor the resulting ironies (and, of course, the cash); a relic of the frontier, he takes sly pleasure in recalling that while his own funeral took place, he stayed “holed up in the room where they had the TV set” and “laughed at a Western movie on the tube.”
In his latest novel, Ethan Canin tells the story of a potentially Faustian bargain — a story in which the hero, from first chapter to last, is tempted to mortgage his soul. Canin recognizes that selling out to the devil is old hat as themes go and that the truly interesting version of this story focuses on the pitting of integrity against charisma. For Orno Tarcher — a self-described “hayseed” from Cook’s Grange, Mo., who comes east to attend Columbia University — the glamour and intellectual diversions of New York City are “a seduction.” At the heart of that seduction is Marshall Emerson, a fellow freshman with an academic family, a liar’s charm and a photographic memory — he dazzles friends by reciting whole pages of their textbooks verbatim.
Orno worships Emerson’s sophistication: “The world of influence seemed astoundingly close and even more astoundingly pedestrian, tossed off by Marshall with a nonchalance that Orno soon found himself cultivating.” Thralldom is among Canin’s central subjects. In “Emperor of the Air,” his first short story collection, men and boys, mesmerized by larger-than-life individuals, must come to grips with their attraction to a wildness they don’t seem to share. Canin is intrigued by the suspect nature of the worshiper and by the worshipee’s uncanny ability to understand and exploit admiration. In his story “American Beauty,” an erratic and sometimes sadistic man tells his adoring 16-year-old brother, “You’re a bastard, too … You just don’t know it yet.”
Orno is no bastard, and therein lies one of the novel’s strengths. To Canin’s credit, the love affairs, drinking and one-upmanship of Marshall’s set are not the primary charms of the story. Equal time and affection are lavished on describing Orno’s academic struggles. A midterm in dental school, where Orno winds up after a less-than-brilliant undergraduate career, is unaccountably riveting. Even teeth — which are numbered, “not named for kings or planets” — have their own romance. In half a line, Canin perfectly captures how ambivalent his hero is about overreaching; Orno, atop the Empire State Building, finds that “the overpowering views [fill] him with fear not of falling but of flying upward.”
“For Kings and Planets” is clearly intended as a paean to the beauty of leading an ordinary life. Unfortunately, Orno’s sturdiness is so overdrawn that it sometimes feels like a put-on (which, alas, it isn’t). Arriving in New York with “hopes of deeds and glory,” he remembered thinking, “I am no longer among my own.” Such B-movie lines undercut the novel’s force and complexity. Canin pretends that the fate of Orno’s soul is up for grabs, when no one — not even the world’s biggest hayseed — could mistake which way the wind is blowing. Apparently, the moral of “For Kings and Planets” is not that nice guys finish first or last, but that they speak in clichis and graduate at the middle of their dental school class.
