Prodigal Summer

Barbara Kingsolver understands that human life boils down to three basic essentials—birth, death, and sex. Kingsolver’s “Prodigal Summer” is a 444-page celebration of both the wildness that unites humans with the natural world and the deep emotional capacity that make us unique.

Most readers probably know Kingsolver from the award-winning “Poisonwood Bible,” published two years before “Prodigal Summer.” Like “Poisonwood,” the newer novel explores the relationship between people and the land they live on, this time in southern Appalachia. Kingsolver interweaves three story strands set in the fictional Zebulon County near the border of North Carolina and Tennessee. In this small farming community on the edge of a great forest, the contact between human and nature is still immediate and meaningful in a way it is not in the concrete and stone of Cambridge.

Each of the three protagonists looks to the wild to solve their essentially human problems.

The aged Garnett desperately tries to save the disappearing American Chestnut tree, crossing and re-crossing genes. Lusa, a newly widowed outsider, buries her grief in the insect world, stripping the complexities of human emotion down to the single filaments on the wing of a moth. And Deanna, a lean mountain woman, jealously guards a newly arrived coyote family in the forest.

As each of the protagonists seeks to escape the intricacies of human life, their fascinations with nature become vehicles for their interactions with other humans, linking them back to their own species.

But the characters of “Prodigal Summer” cannot escape the fact that, in some indefinable way, humans are not the same as other species. Kingsolver reveals that important things reside in the gap between what is human and what is wild: love, kinship, pride. Throughout the novel, each character confronts this gap, some with more success than others.

Reality in contemporary literature often implies detachment and cynicism. And sex? Authors either detail awkward experiences that leave you cringing or give intellectualized versions of the primal thrusting found in Danielle Steel novels.

Kingsolver knows something not only about the insatiable craving of desire, but about the inevitable complications that follow when humans pursue it. The sex in “Prodigal Summer” is instinctive and exuberant, whether occurring in an abandoned chestnut log or on a crushed bed of wildflowers.

Barbara Kingsolver’s “Prodigal Summer” is one of the few books that makes the 700-mile trek to Harvard with me every year.

One reason is the vivid and accurate representation of the unique landscape of the southern Appalachian Mountains, my home. From the pervasive, heavy scent of honeysuckle to the soft moistness of the morning air, Kingsolver captures the essence of an Appalachian summer.

At Harvard, preoccupied either with the life of the mind or with the pragmatic path of ambition, we tend to forget how closely we are interlocked with the rest of biology.

In “Prodigal Summer” humans are just another species on the earth, physical creatures with their needs and desires. This physicality does not diminish humanity, but elevates it. The next time you need an escape from the gray winter of Harvard, open “Prodigal Summer” and immerse yourself in a lush, sensuous world where wildness can still be found.

Prodigal Summer
By Barbara Kingsolver
Harper Perennial
Out Now