Kingsolver

Small Wonder: Essays by Barbara Kingsolver

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As mentioned in my previous post, I’ve just read Small Wonder, a collection of essays by Barbara Kingsolver published in 2002, some or all of them gathered from the places they’d been published in the previous few years. It is my first encounter with Kingsolver’s own, non-fictional voice – and yet I somehow felt that I would have recognised it anywhere. It’s exactly the sort of voice you’d expect from the author of her novels – and many of the same themes, of ecology, family, power, and love.

Much of her writing is political – with a small-p, or at least a medium-sized one. The great dividing line in the essays is, of course, 9/11. She is clearly writing in a world still reeling, but she courageously looks beyond the shock and grief – and questions what the response says about the American psyche. What the correct way for the average person to respond is – not dictating how someone should respond emotionally, perhaps, but asking what a proportionate and wise collective response might be. She received death threats for her views (and writes a brilliant chapter on how people have claimed the flag and ‘being American’ for a specific viewpoint – which certainly hasn’t changed). How brave of her to write something like this in 2002:

The American moral high ground can’t possibly be an isolated mountaintop from which we refuse to learn anything at all to protect ourselves from monstrous losses. It is critical here to distinguish between innocence and naïveté: the innocent do not deserve to be violated, but only the naive refuse to think about the origins of the violence. A nation that seems to believe so powerfully in retaliation cannot flatly refuse to look at the world in terms of cause and effect. The rage and fury of this world have not notably lashed out at Canada (the nation that takes best care of its citizens), or Finland (the most literate), or Brazil or Costa Rica (among the most biodiverse). Neither have they tried to strike down our redwood forests or the fields of waving grain. Striving to cut us most deeply, they felled the towers that seemed to claim we buy and sell the world.

If she is measured and thoughtful in her writings on politics, perhaps aware of the incendiary resposnes, Kingsolver allows herself to be fiercer when it comes to ecology. Readers of Prodigal Summer won’t be surprised. It is still measured, but it feels like anger that has been distilled into eloquence. I didn’t note down any of the quotes, but she is incredulous about people’s wilful ignorance about the limited resources we are taking from the earth.

Nature is a key theme in Small Wonder, whether macro or micro. She writes beautifully about a hummingbird constructing her nest. And I also loved this, on the joy of living immersed in nature (sidenote, also my first introduction to the American spelling of artefact):

I have come to depend on these places where I live and work. I’ve grown accustomed to looking up from the page and letting my eyes relax on a landscape upon which no human artifact intrudes. No steel, pavement, or streetlights, no architecture lovely or otherwise, no works of public art or private enterprise – no hominid agenda. I consider myself lucky beyond words to be able to go to work every morning with something like a wilderness at my elbow. In the way of so-called worldly things, I can’t seem to muster a desire for cellular phones or cable TV or to drive anything flashier than a dirt-colored sedan older than the combined ages of my children. My tastes are much more extreme: I want wood-thrush poetry. I want mountains.

This is not the most personal collection of essays (though one certainly gets to know her as a person), but I did also love those that dealt with her life. There are some about her writing career, some about her love of books, and some about her family. My favourite two essays in the collection were back-to-back – ‘Letter to a Daughter at Thirteen’ and ‘Letter to My Mother’. They are simultaneously specific and universal. Her emotional restraint in them somehow makes them feel all the deeper – like when someone is trying to hold back tears.

The structure of her essays does become slightly samey, when read all in a row. She starts from a specific anecdote and widens to the general – not an unusual structure for an essay, of course, but I began to wait for the story about her daughter’s homework, or the conversation she heard in a shop, or reporting a weird story she’d read in a newspaper, to widen out into commentary on a much broader political, social, or environmental topic. And perhaps I preferred her on the detail – on the anecdote, the small moment – than on the rallying cry. The latter is necessary, but it is the former where her gift for precision truly shines. And I think that is my taste for any essay, really. The beautiful, revealing, surprising detail.

It’s interesting to read this collection from a distance of almost two decades. While the issues haven’t changed all that much, popular stances have. Kingsolver’s passionate cries on behalf of the environment are almost mainstream now. Her awareness of global need, and the power and responsibility held by the US, became central discussion topics post-9/11 and never really went away – but it is chilling to read about the Taliban then, and see what’s happening now. And with the eyes of a reader in 2021, Kingsolver’s essays that mention political division seem almost naive. There’s an area that has certainly got worse. I wonder if she has written an essay on Trump and his disciples.

In some ways, reading a collection from 20 years ago can feel more dated than from 100 years ago, because it is in living memory. Her comments on the ubiquity of mobile phones, for instance, read like someone in 1920 complaining of the speed of the infrequent 15-mph cars outside their window. But if she was often a voice in the wilderness, and would still be ignored by a significant section of the flag-wielding, climate-change-denying political spectrum, it does feel like many of her concerns have become much more widely held. The immediacy of these essays has been lost, but the distance also gives perspective to which issues still need to be discussed – which have got better, which worse, and which (like the hummingbird’s nest-building) exist as curiously eternal moments in the midst of the shifting topics of the day.

K is for Kingsolver

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This is part of an ongoing series where I write about a different author for each letter of the alphabet. You can see them all here.

I don’t have a lot of candidates for ‘K’ in the alphabet, though perhaps more than I would have expected at first: I own and have read books by Emily Kimbrough, Jessie Kesson, Molly Keane, Margaret Kennedy, Sheila Kaye-Smith off the top of my head, and maybe even some books by men beginning with K too. But Barbara Kingsolver is my choice – partly because she wrote one of my favourite reads of recent years, and also because I know she is well-loved across the blogosphere.

How many books do I have by Barbara Kingsolver?

I’ve got five books by Kingsolver, which is quite low for an author in this series – perhaps you remember the dizzying piles of Crompton and Delafield books. But there are probably more pages in these five than five books by any other author I have in the house.

How many of these have I read?

From this pile, I’ve only read three (including one I finished yesterday). Confusingly, I’ve read another two that aren’t here – and one of the pile I have read was actually another edition. The Lacuna has had a journey of getting, giving away unread, re-buying, and still not having read.

How did I start reading Barbara Kingsolver?

My first Kingsolver was The Bean Trees, borrowed from a friend and finally bought earlier this year. It was part of a postal book group I was in, where we chose a book and posted it around a dozen people before it came back with a notebook of comments and thoughts. I loved it, but then I read The Poisonwood Bible for a book group. I can’t remember if it was borrowed from the library or a friend, or if I decided not to keep it – but it made me lukewarm on Kingsolver (for reasons I’ll go into below). It was only when doing A Century of Books that I turned to Pigs in Heaven because I needed something to read to fill the 1993 slot. It was so brilliant that I got back on the Kingsolver train. (The only I’ve read that isn’t pictured is Prodigal Summer, which I listened to as an audiobook.)

General impressions…

As you may have gathered from the above – mixed! Pigs in Heaven is one of the best modern novels I’ve read (I can count 1990s as modern, right?) and I loved The Bean Trees. I did like Prodigal Summer a lot, though perhaps could have done with a little less description of the environment and more about the fascinating characters she had created. As for The Poisonwood Bible – some brilliant writing, the final quarter should have been lopped off, and the preacher was a rare misstep in Kingsolver’s aptitude for subtlety. And I’ve just finished Small Wonder, a collection of her essays, which I’ll write about soon and which were great – if rather locked in one particular moment of time.

Overall – I think she is a great prose writer, able to be just poetic enough without losing the storytelling momentum. I’m not sure the things I find interesting totally overlap with what she finds interesting, and I think she’s at her best when she doesn’t let the message overpower the story. But I will certainly keep reading her (and her ENORMOUS books) and am glad that such a thoughtful writer is finding a wide audience.

Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver

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Having surprised myself by how I loved Pigs in Heaven last year, I was keen to read more by Barbara Kingsolver. I wouldn’t have read Pigs in Heaven if it weren’t for A Century of Books, and I was glad to find it still on my shelf – as I’d got rid of a few Kingsolver novels when I moved house. Mostly because they’re usually chunksters, and take up too much room on my limited shelves. Well, I ended up kicking myself for that, didn’t I?

After asking around, I decided to give Prodigal Summer (2000) a go – and I also decided (shelf space still an issue) to listen to the audiobook, read by Kingsolver herself. I didn’t know a lot about it, except that it had multiple narratives. And that it was very many hours long.

Unlike many books with multiple narratives, these weren’t separate perspectives on the same central story. Rather, these are tales of three people living different lives in the same broad area in Virginia. It covers a single summer, transformative for each of them in different ways. They are:

  • Deanna, a woman who lives alone in the mountains, working as a park ranger, fascinated by predators. Her role is to protect the area, and she is very content without human intervention – which is, of course, exactly what she gets in the form of a passing young man…
  • Lusa (pronounced Luther) has recently moved to the area, living with her husband Cole and feeling ostracised by his extensive family. As the oldest brother, he has the most land – and Lusa is used to an urban life, where she was an entomologist.
  • Garnett, an old and widowed man whose remaining passion is cultivating chestnut trees to try to restore the lineage of the extinct American Chestnut. He has an ongoing enmity with his neighbour Nannie, who grows organic apples and hates pesticides.

It is a rich a complex novel. Each of the characters has enormous depth, including most of the many secondary characters, and Kingsolver unfolds this in a leisurely way over the course of the book. I particularly appreciated that Deanna is not a lonely spinster type, and that she loves the solitude – or, rather, the human solitude. One of my favourite moments in the book is the line that “solitude is a human presumption’, because of course she is always surrounded by any number of creatures, large and small.

Even characters who initially seem a little cartoonishly drawn, through the eyes of Lusa or Garnett, grow as Lusa and Garnett learn more about them – whether that be tragedies in Nannie’s past, or Lusa discovering more about her siblings-in-law, nephews, and nieces. I shan’t say the enormous moment that affects Lusa’s journey, but it happens very early on and sets the tone for all of her sections.

So, I loved almost anything which involved more than one (human!) character. Kingsolver is brilliant at the gradual evolving of human relationships (romantic or otherwise), and paces them wonderfully. What I didn’t love so much were scenes with only one person in – and there are a lot of them. Equally, some polemical scenes are rather overdone.

The reason for these introspective scenes is often because of biology. As you may have spotted, all three of the main characters are fascinated – even obsessed – by one element of nature. Lusa the entomologist, Garnett and his trees, Deanna and coyotes. If you are also interested in biology, then this might also fascinate you. I am profoundly uninterested in bugs, trees, or predators. Nothing in science has ever really captivated me, and biology was always bottom of the list. Kingsolver evidently shares these interests, and explores them at length, but I would have preferred more about the human interactions and less thinking about food chains or cross-pollination.

And there are some scenes where one character will elaborate to another why their biological perspective is wrong – the lack of subtlety here reminded me of Kingsolver’s lack of subtlety in The Poisonwood Bible, which had initially put me off reading anything more by her. Deanna, particularly, with her lectures on why you shouldn’t kill coyotes, really began to pall at times. It was narratively interesting to me.

On the other hand, what did work with an impressive subtlety was the interweaving of the narratives. It was very occasional, and didn’t lead to any enormous revelations or substantive changes in the direction the novel was heading, but we gradually learn about the connections between these seemingly distinct lives. It helped give greater reality to this world she’d created.

Ultimately, then, I don’t think this book is ‘for me’ in the way that Pigs in Heaven was. But I think it would be the perfect book for somebody interested in biology and novels with real human depth – and, despite its faults or elements that put me off, I’ll be thinking about those wonderfully realised characters for a long time.

 

Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver

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I was finding 1993 quite difficult to fill in my century of books, and I asked people on Twitter which of my 1993 books they’d recommend that I pick up. It turned out that I didn’t have one of them on my shelves any longer, a biography of Elizabeth Gaskell, but I did have Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver. For some reason I wasn’t especially keen to read it, but enough people on Twitter convinced me that I should give it a go that I took it away on holiday and, guess what – it’s amazing.

This isn’t the first Kingsolver novel I’ve read, in fact it’s the third. One of those is her most famous, The Poisonwood Bible, which I actually didn’t like as much as most people seem to have done. I suppose my problem was with her painting this ogreish portrait of the patriarchal missionary, and then implying (or at least I inferred) that he was intended to represent the whole world of missionaries. It felt a little lazy. But before that I read The Bean Trees, I think before I started blogging, and it turns out that Pigs in Heaven is a sequel to that. I should say from the outset that it’s fine to read this novel independently, and in fact I couldn’t remember very much about The Bean Trees that except for the fact that I liked it. Pigs in Heaven tells you everything you need to know about what came before.

The main thing you need to know from that novel is that Taylor adopted young Native American girl called Turtle, given to her by a stranger in a car park. The years have passed, and Taylor is a devoted mother, unable to imagine a life without her young daughter. She is also in a relationship with a musician-of-sorts, called Jax. I rather loved reading their conversations, which were believably affectionate while maintaining a constant undercurrent of uncertainty – just how much are they joking and how much are real tensions coming to the surface? It is something dramatic that starts to change the life Taylor has made for herself, even though that dramatic thing happens to somebody else. While on a road trip to the Grand Canyon, her daughter sees a man fall into a dangerously deep cave – being so young, Turtle doesn’t realise the gravity of this until afterwards, and assumes her mother knows what has happened and is unconcerned. It is only when bringing its to Taylor’s attention that a rescue mission is mounted – despite police initially being reluctant to believe that the 4 year old has not imagined the whole thing.

The man is rescued, and Turtle becomes something of a celebrity – at least temporarily – and is invited onto an episode of Oprah for children who have saved lives. This catches the attention of a lawyer, Annawake, who decides to intervene. She is from the Cherokee Nation herself, and knows that the adoption which Taylor describes is not legal. With her own history of a brother who was taken away from family and community, Annawake sees it as her responsibility to reunite Turtle with her heritage – even if that means taking her away from her mother. (The pigs in Heaven, incidentally, are stars – a constellation you may know as the Seven Sisters.)

There are plenty of novelists who use a moral quandary as the centre of a narrative, to greater or lesser levels of success. To be honest, I am likely to run from a novel that describes itself as issue-driven – and the great thing about Kingsolver is that it never feels as though the ‘issue’  is the driving force. Nor is there any sense that there is a correct answer – as a white person myself, I am very likely to be drawn towards the argument that a child should not be separated from her adoptive mother, but Kingsolver has characters like Annawake who can vocalise that this sense of priorities is not any more objective than those which might make somebody wants to reunite a child with her ancestral community. And so what drives this novel, perfectly, is character.

Unlike The Poisonwood Bible, there are no cartoonish villains. There are simply people who are trying to do the right thing – or, with some of the more incidental characters, have lost any sense of what the right thing might be.

Women on their own run in Alice’s family. This dawns on her with the unkindness of a heart attack and she sits up in bed to get a closer look at her thoughts, which have collected above her in the dark.

That is the opening paragraph of this multi-generational novel. Alice is Taylor’s mother, and has recently made her own possibly ill-advised marriage. The family do not have the ingrained traditions of the Cherokee Nation, but they have their own localised one of women being alone – though none of the women in this book are alone as it starts, it hangs over them like a threat, or occasionally like a happy promise. Taylor’s fear of losing Turtle means they go on the run together, and Kingsolver masterfully weaves a road trip novel into this multifaceted narrative – with the possibilities that brings for funny or strange or poignant temporary characters.

As I say, it is character that is foremost – with their reflections on anything from their choice of words to their ultimate fate. Kingsolver uses her premise to give us a rich, rich portrait of many different people – even when they’re not the most pleasant people, she makes us want to spend time with them. It is riveting, as well as beautifully written. It is also evocative, not just of place but of being. I suppose what I mean by that is that it is wholly immersive.

I read a lot of books, as do we all, and it’s not often that I miss the world that I have been in once it is finished. But I wish I were back in Kingsolver’s world – and I think I might be left in the curious position of wanting to reread the original to this sequel, just to stay in that world. Hopefully that won’t leave me in an indefinite loop, but if it does, there are worse places to be. (And, to escape that loop, which Kingsolver novels would you recommend?)

The Poisonwood Bible: other views

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I meant to include links to other bloggers’ views yesterday, but I was too tired by the time I finished exploring my own!  So today’s post is a little addendum to yesterday’s…


The world, it seems, is filled with bloggers who have written about The Poisonwood Bible.  I’ve just picked some of the bloggers I already know and love.  If you have an insatiable appetite for reviews, I recommend you check out Fyrefly’s wonderful blog search engine.  It’s invaluable!

“The writing was exquisitely well balanced, the story was absorbing and the Congo was portrayed as though it were another character rather than merely a place.” – Old English Rose

“It’s a story about religious beliefs, a story of the disintegration of a family, and a story about forgiveness.” – Bibliophile by the Sea

“Recommended to anyone with the patience to read a long, slow novel.” – Jackie, Farm Lane Books

“The Poisonwood Bible is a brilliant, heartfelt and passionate love letter to Africa and the problems it faces. Kingsolver manages to combine a family saga, a political treatise and a love story into a wonderful book.” – Sakura, Chasing Bawa

“The setting is all-important in The Poisonwood Bible. The Congo is as much as character as any of the Prices.” – Curious Book Fans

“But then, after all of that emotion, everything petered out and the book just kept going.” – Eva, A Striped Armchair

“It’s a book that has stuck long in my memory, maybe because it paints such a remarkable picture based on reality and truth.” – Margaret, Books Please

The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver

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Well, I finished The Poisonwood Bible (1998) with a couple of hours to spare before book group… and, having worked out what I think about it, I am ready to write my review.  It’s quite difficult to formulate my thoughts on this novel, because these thoughts do not all lean in the same direction.  Reviews feel like they should be unified, and that’s rather tricky when I have both positive and negative responses to a book.  So… bear with me.  I’ll bear with you bearing with me.  Hopefully by the end of the page we’ll understand one another, no?

First things first, The Poisonwood Bible ought to be about 200 pages shorter.  I don’t mean that careful and judicious editing throughout is needed, to compress the narrative (although this wouldn’t be a bad idea) – I mean that it should have ended on p.427.  There are 616 pages in the edition I read (rather more than the supposed 350 page upper-limit of book group choices) and there shouldn’t be.  I am astonished that any editor let Kingsolver keep going for those final 189 pages.  It was self-indulgent and unnecessary.  But, now I’ve got that off my chest, I can return to the review proper.  It gets more positive soon, promise.
The Poisonwood Bible follows the Price family from 1959 to the 1990s – Nathan is a Baptist minister from Georgia (the US state, not the country), and has brought his wife Orleanna and daughters Rachel, Leah, Adah, and Ruth May to the Congo.  They are there as missionaries, but all is not going to go entirely to plan… to say the least.  This is the basic premise of Kingsolver’s novel – and from such a simple idea, she weaves a long and complex novel.  Complex in terms of emotions, interactions, and gradual self-discovery, that is.  Not a lot really happens.  (Another reason why The Poisonwood Bible is difficult to write about.  Honestly, Barb!)
Five voices make up the narrative, each in the first person.  Orleanna Price speaks briefly at the beginning of each section  – which are named after Biblical (and Apocryphal) books – Genesis, The Revelation, The Judges, Bel and the Serpent, Exodus.  She speaks wearily, always in retrospect, and keeps her cards close to her chest.  Doubtless this is partly so plot points aren’t revealed too early, and her melancholy ambiguity includes one momentous hint which kept me gripped and guessing for hundreds of pages.
But it is the four daughters who are the mainstay of the novel.  The narrative is passed between them, and Kingsolver constructs their four voices brilliantly, distinctly, and consistently.  Her fellow American novelist, Marilynne Robinson, hugely impressed me with Gilead because of her ability to ‘capture’ a voice – and while Kingsolver has a rather different slant on a minister, she certainly writes beautifully for his daughters.  Since they are so thoroughly depicted, it’s difficult to summarise their characters – but, broadly speaking, I’ll try.
Rachel is the eldest, a white-blonde ingenue whose Malapropisms (‘never the train shall meet’) and simple, unimaginative nature are initially endearing, but eventually rather concerning.  She never loses the all-American slang expressions she brings with her to Congo, and I rather liked her indefatigable sassiness, even if it is accompanied with a lack of cultural awareness.  
Leah and Adah are twins – Leah desperately seeks the approval of her father, and carries with her the guilt that, in the womb, she ’caused’ Adah’s disability.  Adah limps badly, and almost never speaks.  She also has a fascination with seeing things backgrounds, and especially palindromes.  Silent to others, her narration reveals her cynicism and bitterness, but also her humour.
Ruth May, finally, is the youngest – and the simplest.  Not in terms of intelligence, but in the simple, contented way she adapts to her surroundings, making friends amongst the neighbours, and doing her best to understand her father’s teaching in their new environment.
For Kingsolver is not subtle about the clash of cultures.  Here, the welcome party for the Prices is interrupted by Nathan:
“Reverend and Mrs. Price and your children!” cried the younger man in the yellow shirt.  “You are welcome to our feast.  Today we have killed a goat to celebrate your coming.  Soon your bellies will be full with our fufu pili-pili.”At that, why, the half-naked women behind him just burst out clapping and cheering, as if they could no longer confine their enthusiasm for a dead goat.[…]”Nakedness,” Father repeated, “and darkness of the soul!  For we shall destroy this place where the loud clamour of the sinners is waxen great before the face of the Lord!” No one sang or cheered anymore.  Whether or not they understood the meaning of ‘loud clamour,’ they didn’t dare be making one now.  They did not even breathe, or so it seemed.  Father can get a good deal across with just his tone of voice, believe you me. 
This is, firstly, a great example of Kingsolver’s exceptional ability to convey individuals’ voices through minor verbal tics.  Perhaps it isn’t clear from just this excerpt, but only Rachel’s narrative would have that ‘why’ in the second paragraph; only Rachel would finish ‘believe you me’.  If Adah’s sections have the most obvious stylistic identifications, the others are subtly tied to their narratives too.  That is the greatest strength of The Poisonwood Bible, and the strength that encourages me to read more by Barbara Kingsolver – the ability to create a character’s voice.

Which makes it all the more frustrating that, in Nathan Price, she has done nothing of the kind.  The women of The Poisonwood Bible are drawn so well, so cleverly.  And, in the midst of them all, is Nathan.  He never comes alive, he is scarcely more than a Bad Man Who Does Bad Things.  His motivations aren’t addressed, he has no depth whatsoever – it is a shambolic waste of an opportunity.  I don’t think it’s simply my Christianity (and the fact that I know a lovely, hard-working, deeply loving missionary in D.R. Congo) that makes me feel this – others at book group certainly agreed.  Nathan is angry, selfish, insensitive, violent… it was when he started hitting his children that my eyes rolled so much that I felt a little dizzy. Doubtless there are other novels where one meets ogres – Barbara Comyns’ The Vet’s Daughter, for example, or any novel by Dickens – but in those books they are in the midst of the surreal and exaggerated.  Nathan Price is not, and, though all his attributes are individually believable, as a composite, without any redeeming features, they are not.  It is such a pity that Kingsolver allowed herself this laziness.  Had she made Nathan a character, rather than a two-dimensional face of Wicked Colonialism, The Poisonwood Bible would have been more interesting.  Then again, perhaps she just wanted Nathan as a catalyst to explore the reactions of the female characters?  That’s the most charitable conclusion I can draw.

As I said before, very little happens.  We see the daughters try to adjust to their situation – their interactions with neighbours, who are variously kind or antagonistic and endlessly curious – and the gradually altering politics of Congo.  Pages and pages go by without anything particularly occurring, but they are somehow engaging.  Ruth May introduces ‘Mother May I’ to local infants; Rachel’s hair is a spectacle to all; Adah is presumed eaten by a lion (but is not); Leah grows more and more interested in the teacher Anatole… mostly Kingsolver attempts the miracle of winding a narrative through emotions and thoughts without hanging them on events – and she succeeds.  It is beautiful writing.  It is also nigh-on impossible to review.  There is one odd thing… usually I jot down resonant or stand-out quotations whilst I read, or excerpts I think will help structure a blog post.  For The Poisonwood Bible, I wrote down nothing.  Kingsolver’s writing is all even and constant – it all weaves into one.

But, as I noted at the top, something very weird happens.  The Prices’ time in the Congo comes to an abrupt, tragic end.  And then, p.427, they leave.  After that it is as though it were another novel.   We follow the various daughters at occasional intervals for another couple of decades.  It is tedious and politically heavy-handed.  The points Kingsolver had previously shown through her story are now told through dialogue.  Show, don’t tell, Barb.  All the unsubtlety in her portrayal of Nathan sweeps across the others.  I still can’t believe that a novel can peter out quite like this one did.

So, there you are.  A confusing review, I daresay, but also a confusing read.  At its best, The Poisonwood Bible is phenomenally good.  Barbara Kingsolver is obviously an exceptionally talented writer.  The Bean Trees, which I read years ago, is also testament to this.  But at its best, The Poisonwood Bible is lazy, clumsy, unsubtle and poorly edited.  Overall I will say that Kingsolver’s talents outweigh her occasional mismanagement of them, but it is always a shame when a novel could have been great (and, to be fair, a lot of people do consider it great) but, to my mind, failed to reach its potential.