[In the following review, Lehmann-Haupt offers tempered assessment of Pigs in Heaven, praising Kingsolver's prose and humor though finding fault in the novel's lack of moral tension.]

“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.” So begins the appealing homespun poetry of Barbara Kingsolver's new novel, Pigs in Heaven, about a moral conflict between the claims of mother love and the needs of a community.

What Alice Greer sees above her in the dark are the thoughts that her latest marriage has gone dead and that she longs for the company of her daughter, Taylor, who lives in Tucson, Ariz., with Turtle, her adopted 6-year-old Cherokee girl, and Jax, the charming leader of a band called the Irascible Babies. The trouble is that when Taylor and Turtle were visiting the Hoover Dam, Turtle happened to notice a man falling into a spillway.

After Turtle convinces the authorities that she didn't imagine what she saw, the successful rescue of the man brings her national celebrity. This catches the attention of Annawake Fourkiller, an idealistic young lawyer for the Cherokee Nation who lives in Heaven, Okla.

Annawake insists that Cherokee children can only survive if they are reared in a community of their people. She illustrates this by explaining that to Cherokees the Pleiades are known as the Six Pigs in Heaven, after six bad boys who were turned into pigs by their mothers for not being civic-minded.

In response, Taylor Greer points out that she didn't seek out Turtle for adoption; the child was abandoned in Taylor's car after suffering abuse that left her traumatized. The three-year healing process has left Taylor and Turtle deeply attached to each other. When Annawake gently warns Taylor that she may press her community's claim, Taylor runs away with Turtle.

The author of The Bean Trees, to which this is a sequel; other works of fiction and Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983, Ms. Kingsolver writes with down-home humor that never patronizes her characters but rather underlines their generosity and spiritedness. Unfortunately, there isn't much conflict or tension in her story. On the one hand, Taylor and Turtle have a terrible time trying to survive the American rat race by themselves. On the other hand, even adolescent boys are polite and considerate in the Cherokee community. There are in fact no pigs in Heaven, Okla.

The case for community is so one-sided and the outcome so predictable that the reader begins to suffocate in all the sweetness. You begin to cringe at treacly lines like “Heaven's on down the trail a little bit” and “I oftentimes have communication problems with my heart.” Ms. Kingsolver is oftentimes a talented, funny writer in Pigs in Heaven, but after a while you begin to wish she would invent a Hell, Okla., and make a case for living there, too.