Earlier this month, a writer in the Guardian lamented the scarcity of novels about “the most pressing and complex problem of our time”: climate change. “We don’t want to have this conversation,” complained Daniel Kramb, “and neither do most characters in most novels being published.”
As Paul Ryan would say, the dangers of this so-called crisis are debatable. Imagine if “most characters in most novels” lectured each other about climate change. I’d push the last polar bear off his melting ice floe to avoid that. And who exactly would be converted by these missing environmental stories? Are oil lobbyists just one good climate-change novel away from seeing the error of their ways?
(Harper) - “Flight Behavior” by Barbara Kingsolver.
Actually, unlike our cowardly presidential candidates, a number of major novelists have raised alarms about the Earth’s health, but novels aren’t particularly effective at articulating political positions or scientific facts. The weakest sections of Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom” are those that hector us about the loss of songbirds. T.C. Boyle, Lydia Millet and Margaret Atwood are already preaching to the overheated choir. Two years ago, when Ian McEwan published, “Solar,” his novel about rising CO2 levels, he admitted that “the best way to tell people about climate change is through nonfiction.”
Now the sun rises on Barbara Kingsolver’s “Flight Behavior,” a climate-change novel described by the publisher as “her most accessible and commercial book to date” — the literary equivalent of whole-wheat pasta your kids will love! There are, of course, reasons to be skeptical. In 2000, Kingsolver established the Bellwether Prize to promote, among other liberal goals, novels that “advocate the preservation of nature.” Fortunately, her own books have been more subtle than the earnest Bellwether winners, and “Flight Behavior” is not the op-ed-in-story-form that one might fear.
The book’s success stems from Kingsolver’s willingness to stay focused on a conflicted young woman and her faltering marriage, while a strange symptom of the degraded environment overwhelms her remote Tennessee town. In the opening pages, we meet Dellarobia Turnbow, “lighting out her own back door to wreck her reputation.” She’s a mother of two, walking alone up a mountain to commit adultery with a 22-year-old telephone repairman. “Her betrayals shocked her,” Kingsolver writes. “It was like watching some maddened, unstoppable, and slightly cuter version of herself on television, doing things a person could never do with just normal life.”
There’s a propulsive moral tension in this opening scene, which is suddenly heightened by a vision. Before Dellarobia consummates her woodland tryst, she sees the whole mountainside on fire — blazing like Moses’ burning bush. “The flame now appeared to lift from individual treetops in showers of orange sparks, exploding the way a pine log does in a campfire when it’s poked. The sparks spiraled upward in swirls like funnel clouds. Twisters of brightness against gray sky.”But there’s no smoke and no sound — a spiritual revelation that changes Dellarobia’s heart and sends her scurrying back to her drab home.
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