Kingsolver – A Review (Rumination)

I thought to call this piece a review, but I have a daughter. And as any mother of a daughter knows, what we think doesn’t matter. She graciously pointed out to me that I’ve never written a “review.” Not a proper review. She likes what I write but, they’re not reviews.

Okay. I’ll call this a rumination – as I will all my reviews henceforward.

That same daughter introduced me to Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, a marvelous novel written in first person. First person from five points of view. As a writer, I understand the difficulty of portraying a character’s unique point of view, then maintaining that identifiable point of view through the length of a novel. Kingsolver did it with five characters, a mother and her four daughters, the children ranging in age from five to fifteen at the beginning. She wrote each as an identifiable individual with particular peculiarities of thought and language. Five significant and singular points of view.

So when I was looking for a book of creative nonfiction Kingsolver’s name in the credits of Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction, along with Amy Tan and David Sedaris, I was sold.

Creative nonfiction is new to me. At least the term. Having enjoyed David Sedaris and Bailey White and Baxter Black for years on NPR, Creative nonfiction in the short form is not new to me at all. Come to think of it, Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant” would be considered creative nonfiction.

“But that’s not what I come here to talk about.”

I came here to talk about Barbara Kingsolver, the woman I met in her work “High Tide in Tucson,” a wonderful true story that begins with a displaced hermit crab and moves into her life.

Kingsolver doesn’t define herself as a high school English teacher would, giving us her date of birth and where she went to school and when she married and how many children she has and how many awards and commendations she’s received. Or, as too commonly with autobiographies and memoirs of people successful in their field, what celebrities she’s met and slept with and/or disapproved of.

She offers us her view of living. Not in florid and overblown language, but concretely as a true word smith should.

“It’s not such a wide gulf to cross,” she writes “from survival to poetry. We hold fast to the old passions of endurance that buckle and creak beneath us, dovetailed, tight as a good wooden boat to carry us onward. And onward full tilt we go, pitched and wrecked and absurdly resolute, driven in spite of everything to make good on a new shore.” 

I've been there and am doing that. I bet you have and are, too.