Putting ‘culture wars’ under the microscope
Kingsolver uses butterflies to delve into U.S. divisions
Barbara Kingsolver’s latest novel, Flight Behavior, opens with what appears to be a miracle. Dellarobia Turnbow, the central character, is leaving her husband, Cub, whom she married as a pregnant teenager. She’s on her way to meet another man when she stumbles on an entire forested valley alight with cold orange flame. She’s not sure what it is, but it’s enough to send her back to her husband and two children, with a determination to repair what’s wrong in her marriage.
When her husband and his father plan to log the valley where she saw the vision, Dellarobia insists they go up there to check it out first. This time, Dellarobia wears her glasses, and her vision is transformed into millions of monarch butterflies, who have ended up on their farm in Appalachia due to a mistake in migration. The phenomenon brings Dr. Ovid Byron, a scientist, to investigate what is going on with the butterflies.
Kingsolver, whose 14 books include The Poisonwood Bible and The Lacuna, said she used this strategy intentionally, to show that things are not always as they first appear.
“The book is all about understanding what we’re seeing,” Kingsolver said by phone from her home in Virginia.
“It was very important that the reader see that first vision of the orange flame as Dellarobia saw it without her glasses and share her amazed confusion and really not have any idea what they’re looking at and then later see it again with knowledge and say, ‘Oh, well of course, why didn’t I see that.’
“It’s about the psychological process of making up our minds first and gathering the facts later.”
Kingsolver, whose background is in science, says she wanted to write about the “culture wars” in the U.S., specifically with respect to climate change.
“People talk about the culture wars as this terrible divide that encompasses rural versus urban and Democrat versus Republican,” Kingsolver said. “As Dellarobia characterizes it in the book, it’s ‘team camo’ and ‘team latte.’ ”
Kingsolver said the polarization inherent in the culture war is a huge issue in the U.S.
“It’s getting harder and harder for anyone to talk with people who don’t agree with them on pretty much everything,” she said.
“Another way to put it is that we’re having more and more success at isolating ourselves from opposing points of view. We can tune into the news station that will tell us exactly what we want to hear; we can have friends who will tell us exactly what we want to hear, especially because we don’t talk to them in person, we chat with them on Facebook.”
At one point in the novel, Dellarobia is talking with a member of the scientific team researching the butterflies. He is a city boy, and the conversation illustrates some of what Kingsolver wants to explore. He tells Dellarobia that to help the environment, she should fly on airplanes less often and take her own containers for leftovers when she goes out to eat.
Dellarobia, whose family is very tight on funds — they’re farmers who are considering logging their land for money — tells him flat out that she has never flown on a plane and the last time she ate in a restaurant was two years ago.
“That’s an example of the culture wars — people who just don’t even have the remotest understanding of the other people’s lives,” Kingsolver said. “I wanted to address that and it’s hard. The challenge was for me to create characters that the reader might initially dislike and gradually reveal layers of depth that the reader doesn’t anticipate.”
Readers have been telling Kingsolver that they really connect with Dellarobia.
“I didn’t know that people would take to her so well. Is she someone you would like as a friend or a neighbour? She’s pretty unhappy, she’s not the kindest person in the world, she’s very honest about the fact that her kids drive her crazy, she is unsentimental about motherhood, she’s not worldly,” Kingsolver said.
“So what is it about her? I guess people like her barely suppressed anguish. She’s making the best of a really difficult life and something about that really moves people.”
Kingsolver lives on a sheep farm with her husband and two daughters in the Appalachia region of southwest Virginia, so she knows her characters well.
“I am surrounded by Dellarobias, absolutely. This was an important novel for me to write because this is the place where I live and the culture in which I grew up and I have a lot
“It’s about the psychological process of making up our minds first and gathering the facts later.” BARBARA KINGSOLVER ON HER NEW BOOK, FLIGHT BEHAVIOR
of respect for the rural farmers of my region,” she said.
“Hillbillies, people of southern Appalachia, are sort of the last ethnic group that people are allowed to make fun of and laugh at. We are real people and our culture is widely mocked and so it was pretty important to convey it accurately and respectfully, while I am also very cognizant of the challenges of rural life — the challenges and the necessary contradictions.”
While monarch butterflies have never ended up on Kingsolver’s farm, she says similar events have occurred around the globe.
“While this one is a pure invention for dramatic purposes — it’s very beautiful and at the same time it is very frightening and terrible — but after I dreamed it up, I went and had a good talk with a scientist who has spent his whole life studying this particular phenomenon,” Kingsolver said. “I was afraid he might laugh me out of his laboratory, but it was just the opposite. He listened with great interest and said it is very plausible — something like that could happen.
“It’s completely grounded in scientific accuracy.”
The Poisonwood Bible was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Orange Prize, and won the national book award of South Africa. The Lacuna won Britain’s Orange Prize for Fiction in 2010 and in 2011, Kingsolver was awarded the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for the body of her work. Kingsolver was trained as a scientist and has a degree in biology, saying almost nobody else writes novels about scientific topics.
“This is territory that I really take as mine. I think it’s important for me to do this and write about science because I can and it is useful.”
She has noticed that people tend to look away when faced with a message they don’t want to hear — such as climate change.
“I would say that is the message of the book — that people turn their heads. I observe it, I’m curious about it and I wanted to explain why,” Kingsolver said. “That’s the Flight Behavior — we’re all eager enough to run away from what we don’t like, and I wanted to take a harder look at that to see what motivates that and what are its consequences.”
Although Flight Behavior has quite a strong environmental message, Kingsolver says she isn’t trying to tell people what they should be doing.
“I’m not about to tell you what to do; I know my place as a writer.
“It’s more of a conversation with yourself. I’m inviting you to have a conversation with yourself and I guess I’m in the room,” Kingsolver said.