Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver

This is the best Barbara Kingsolver book in years.  For my taste, the very best of fiction has multiple layers of messages that are woven together in a well told story.  This book has all the elements that make a book enjoyable, thought-provoking, and memorable for me.

Dellarobia Turnbow is our heroine—she is young, just 28 years old, and she already has two young children, one of them in school.  She is trapped, not just by her poverty, her appalling education and her geography—she is trapped because she has no ability to envision another life for herself.  Her horizons are as bleak as those of inner city women who grew up in the projects, and her ability see beyond them is no better.  Dellarobia is not lucky and she is not cursed.  She doesn’t have family of origin who support her, but her spouse has a close knit family.  She finished high school, but she didn’t have the educational background to get into a four year college—her high school’s lack of a math and science curriculum were reflected in her ACT scores.  She got pregnant in high school, but her partner and his family.  But she is trapped.  Trapped in a marriage she does not love and a life that doesn’t speak to her soul.  She is not bitter about it—she sees her husband as a good man, she sees value in taking care of her family farm land and animals, and she is unhappy with her desires to have sexual affairs and cigarettes.  She is a good and understandable person with virtues and flaws and no rough edges.

Then along comes our agent of change.  Monarch butterflies, who legendarily migrate to Mexico for the winter, have gotten thrown off by the changes in the global climate and land in the millions on the Turnbow farm in the Tennessee hills.  While spectacular to watch, it is a very bad sign indeed—for the monarchs in the short run and for everybody else in the long run.  The monarchs have not landed in an eco-friendly village—far from it.  Luckily, Dellarobia helps the monarch scientists set up shop in her empty barn, and her good deed turns her life around. It is her exposure to two things at more or less the same time that end up being change agents for her.  The first is that one of the scientists, Ovid, sees Dellarobia for who she could be rather than who she is.  He teaches her about the monarchs, and she in turn gives him the language to communicate with non-scientists about the perils he sees in his world.  The second is that Ovid and his wife give Dellarobia a glimpse at what a good marriage is—that, combined with her conviction that her son needs an education that he will not get where he is, gives her both the means and the will to change.  It is moving and believable.

Then there is the not-so-subtle subtext of the novel.  Our stewardship of this warming, melting planet, with its rising seas and alarming new weather extremes, is of primary concern here.   It’s set in a rural, deep red pocket of the country, where God is presumed to work in mysterious ways and climate change is perceived as an elitist lie.  But autumn has brought rains that will not stop. The neighbors’ orchard is rotting, tree roots slip their moorings in waterlogged soil, and the mountainside forest, thick with winged refugees, is in danger of being clear-cut and leaving mudslides behind.   The butterflies are just one of many symptoms, and it is clear—there is a message here that many do not want to acknowledge.  Which it is why it is so lovely to have another story wrapped around this core message of taking care of our planet.  For Kingsolver, the tree is not a symbol of life but a herald of death. The book’s question is whether we can steer the earth toward something better than this.  This is a good one--do not miss it.