Books

reviewed by Dennis Jones

Reading “The Glory Road” by Bob Bach [Pietisten, Summer, 1993] brought back old memories of my travels with friends through the Western States. Like Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac, we would hit the road with little but hope, trusting our luck, and in less than dependable cars.

Last May, I again travelled westward to Tucson, Arizona to visit an old friend. As Bob said, 66 is gone, so I travelled I-40. At Haunted Bookshop in Tucson, Arizona, I picked up the Kingsolver. I first came across Barbara Kingsolver when I was still the editor of our Local 7263 Steelworker’s monthly newsletter, Scraps of Steel. I read about her book, Holding The Line, in Labor Notes, a monthly radical union rag that boasted to be “putting the movement back into the labor movement.” The first paragraph of her preface turned me off, and I never read the book (I am correcting that now). The following is that first paragraph.

On the summer of 1983 I was working as a journalist, making frequent trips to the small strike-ravaged mining towns of southern Arizona in order to write articles for several publications. At that time I drove a light brown Nissan pickup truck. In these blue-collar outposts, the credo “buy American” was no platitude; it was food on the plate. The very first time I parked on Clifton’s main thoroughfare, summoned up my reporter’s nerve, and crossed the street to talk with a group of men standing outside the Steelworkers’ Hall, they looked me up and down and asked pointedly if I belonged to that little Japanese truck. I answered defensively that it was put together at a plant in Tennessee, with union labor. (I’d looked into this.) I couldn’t read from these men’s faces whether I’d given the right answer.

Well, I thought Kingsolver had given the wrong answer. I was sure that Nissan truck was built in Smyrna, Tennessee in a plant that the United Auto Workers were vainly trying to organize. I was turned off, like an overloaded circuit breaker, by that first paragraph — until I picked up two of her books at Haunted Bookshop. Kingsolver handles explosive topics with grace and direction without becoming preachy — a fault of too many topical writers (Upton Sinclair and Dennis Jones, for example). You can see by the above paragraph that she is truly a graceful writer. Oh, the Nissan Quest pickup is union made and is on the AFL-CIO do-buy list.

Kingsolver’s first novel, The Bean Trees, was one that I bought in Tucson. The protagonist, christened “Marietta,” was called “Missy,” evidently because she would stomp her foot as a child and insist that she be called “Miss Marietta.” On leaving Pittman, Kentucky, she made herself two promises. The first was to change her given name. The other was to stay put wherever her car gave out (“a ’55 Volkswagen bug with no windows to speak of, and no back seat and no starter”) gave out. She claimed to have kept to the first promise and to have folded on the second, that is, to “drive west until my car stopped running, and there I would stay. But there were some things I hadn’t considered. Mama taught me all about tires, and many other things besides, but I knew nothing of rocker arms. And I did not know about the Great Plain.” She had her rocker arm fixed in Oklahoma for half of her savings, because as far as she could see, “there was not one tree in the entire state of Oklahoma.”

Tires play a big role in this book — and not just because of the restlessness that typifies the American spirit. “I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbine’s father over the top of the Standard Oil sign.” So goes the first line of the book. Her mother insisted that Missy know how to fix and change tires if she was determined to leave Pittman, and made Missy practice before leaving. At the other end of her journey west, in Tucson, Arizona, she went to work, despite her fear, at a place called Jesus Is Lord Used Tires.

Okay, she reneged on the second promise, but she also fudged on the first one. She decided to let the gas tank of her buggy choose her new first name. Wherever it ran out, she would look for a sign.

I came pretty close to being named after Homer, Illinois, but kept pushing it. I kept my fingers crossed through Sidney, Sadorus, Cerro Gordo, Decatur, and Blue Mound, and coasted into Talorville on the fumes. And so I am Taylor Greer. I suppose you could say I had some part in choosing this name, but there was enough of destiny in it to satisfy me.

Like I said, a little fudging.

I am loath to reveal the involuted plot of The Bean Trees even though I have been told by no less an authority than Dr. Karl Olsson (professor of literature and erstwhile President of North Park College) that a great work does not depend on plot. In other words, knowing the plot should not destroy the enjoyment of the read. Still, the plot of The Bean Trees is as beguiling as the narrative, and it should provide a pleasant surprise, at least for the first reading.

Cosima Noline, of Animal Dreams is a tall woman from of a small town in eastern Arizona. She has an even taller sister who has gone to work with the Sandinistas of Nicaragua. If Taylor Greer of The Bean Trees seems restless, she is a rock compared to Cosima — or Codi, as she is called. The irony is that although Taylor is thousands of miles from her native Kentucky, and Cosima’s sister, Hallie, is thousands of miles from home helping Nicaraguans with their pesticide problems, both of them are much more at home than Codi, who is back in her childhood hometown to teach one year of high school biology.

Biology seems to have more significance in Animal Dreams than in Kingsolver’s first book. The bean tree, or leguminous wisteria, is not merely an ornamental shrub or vine. It gives back to the very soil that sustains it. The final fruition of personal life is not progeny. That is the fruition of and for species. The final fruition personally is death, with its consequent refertilization for the future. Without it there can be no future.

In Animal Dreams, Codi and her friend Loyd (of the misspelled name, according to Codi) are talking about the Pueblo structures they are viewing. Loyd was explaining that the people who built this were his “mama’s folks.” Codi noted that, “it doesn’t even look like it was built . . . . It’s too beautiful. It looks like something alive that just GREW here.” Loyd says, “That’s the idea.” “Of what? The idea of Pueblo architecture?” “Yep. Don’t be some kind of a big hero. No Washington Monuments. Just build something nice that Mother Earth will want to hold in her arms.”

Back when Jehovah was a rookie, and exceptionally jealous as deities were back then, he decided that towers were a bit much. The structure that was being built in Babylon was a threat. Would Mother Earth want to hold the tower of Babel in her arms? Or the IDS Tower (Minneapolis) or Sears Tower (Chicago)? Perhaps Yahweh would accept the Landmark Center (St. Paul) with all of its exquisite judicial rooms tucked inside — but would Mother Earth?

Quality of life has a great deal to do with what Kingsolver’s characters are about. For example, in Animal Dreams, one of the subplots is the effort of the townspeople, especially the women, to save the river that has fed their town since its founding. The company, which considers itself the monetary sustainer of the town, has finally conceded that the river is toxic — a threat to the town’s water supply. Its proposed solution is to divert the river so that it will no longer run through its ancient bed. The women want the river cleaned, not removed.

However, quality of life is only one factor of ecological balance. Perhaps it is the most important one, because it really affects all of life; but some sacrifices must be made to attain it, and, as usual, the working people are the ones most willing to make those sacrifices. Part of their sacrifice is to make sure that the company that thinks of itself as the savior of the world puts up its share. If anyone thinks that this does not constitute sacrifice, he or she has probably never stood on a midWinter picket line. Holding The Line deals with one such struggle.

Kingsolver’s novels are written in first- and third-person narrative which lets the reader into the mind of the protagonist, while allowing the author to deal with her other characters omnisciently. This is the flexibility needed to tell the whole story.

Homeland And Other Stories was published in 1988, five years after the strike against Phelps Dodge. Kingsolver wrote the story of the women: workers and wives of workers. Some of these stories, it appears, come from her notes on the experiences of the women who were helping hold the picket line. The last of the twelve stories, “Why I Am a Danger to the Public,” seems the most likely to have come from this experience.

But no experience seems to be lost to Barbara Kingsolver. Her heritage comes forth with regularity. For example, like herself and Taylor Greer of The Bean Trees, Gloria, in the lead story “Homeland,” is part Native American. Her great-grandmother is full-blooded Cherokee of the Bird Clan: “When I was a child myself,” says Gloria, “my great-grandmother called me by the odd name of Waterbug. I asked her many times why this was, until she said once, to quiet me, ‘I’ll tell you that story’.”

We were on the front-porch swing, in summer, in darkness. I waited while she drew tobacco smoke in and out of her mouth, but she said nothing. “Well,” I said.

Moonlight caught the fronts of her steel-framed spectacles and she looked at me from her invisible place in the dark. “I said I’d tell you that story. I didn’t say I would tell it right now.”

Nor will I. I can tell you that it is worth reading, though. Not always does the storyteller succeed, or, should I say, not always does the story go right, but from Barbara Kingsolver the stories seem uniformly right.

By now it is obvious that I recommend the books of Kingsolver. Perhaps by the time you have finished these three books, Pigs in Heaven will be out in paperback for $12.00.