Barbara Kingsolver

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Child of Two Cultures

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SOURCE: “Child of Two Cultures,” in Chicago Tribune Books, July 11, 1993, p. 4.

[In the following review, Wolitzer offers positive assessment of Pigs in Heaven.]

Fictional characters can continue to live inside a writer's head long after a novel is written, sometimes for so long it seems they ought to pay rent. And sometimes the only way to evict them is to imagine where fortune might have taken them since last encountered on the page and write about them again.

Barbara Kingsolver's charming first novel, The Bean Trees (1988), contained a bunch of such memorable squatters, including Taylor Greer, a spunky young single woman; her adopted daughter, Turtle; Taylor's hilariously wry mother, Alice; and her hypochondriacal friend, Lou Ann Ruiz. In The Bean Trees, these women without men (for the most part), struggled against poverty and other adversities with valor and wit. Now, in that novel's sequel, Pigs in Heaven, the characters, with a few inspired additions, are the same, the Southwestern milieu is similar, but the writing and the story's reach are far greater.

In The Bean Trees, Taylor is heading west alone from Kentucky to Tucson in search of the future when she finds herself in sudden possession of an abandoned child. The child's age is indeterminate—she doesn't speak or walk or respond in any way except to cling tenaciously to Taylor, reminding her of a snapping turtle and thereby earning her that unconventional name.

What is soon discovered, during a medical examination, is that Turtle is an approximately 3-year-old Cherokee Indian who has been severely abused. Under Taylor's patient mothering, the little girl gradually learns to relate to others and to speak; her first words are the names of vegetables, as if the world is a kind of soup in which she's been immersed. Most importantly, the bond between Taylor and Turtle is firmly forged. As Taylor observes at the end of The Bean Trees, she is her new daughter's “main ingredient.”

At the beginning of Pigs in Heaven, Turtle is 6 years old, and she and Taylor are tourists at the Hoover Dam, when the girl witnesses a freak accident. This brings her into modest celebrity; she and Taylor wind up as guests on Oprah Winfrey's talk show, and there they come to the attention of Annawake Fourkiller, a lawyer representing the Cherokee Nation.

The white mother/Cherokee child image alerts and disturbs Annawake. Her own family disintegrated during her childhood, and her twin brother, Gabriel, was adopted-“stolen”—by a white family. Their good intentions were overcome by ignorance of Gabriel's unique needs, and he's grown up to become an habitual criminal.

Annawake questions both Taylor's moral and legal claims to Turtle. As we've learned in The Bean Trees, the adoption was carried out, by necessity, with fabricated information. Still, by virtue of her fierce love, Taylor considers herself Turtle's true and irrevocable parent. Annawake, however, worries about Turtle's forfeited heritage, her rights of access to her tribe, as well as the tribe's rights to her.

It is the author's particular achievement that both sides of the issue are wholly sympathetic, and that in the midst of this compelling story we're given a undidactic, historical overview of the oppression and deconstruction of the Native American family. As a bonus, there are thought-provoking riffs on aging, pop culture, art and the ego, tribal vs. individual instincts, and the nature of sexual fidelity.

Kingsolver crosscuts nimbly among her considerable cast of players, entering everyone's heart and mind with curiosity and courage. Annawake, propelled into the pursuit of Taylor by her ongoing grief about her lost brother, observes that she “has spent years becoming schooled in injustices and knows every one by name, but is still afraid she could forget the face.” Taylor doesn't hesitate to flee with Turtle as soon as she feels threatened by Annawake's interest in them. Yet even in flight, her racial consciousness is raised, and she begins to notice images of Indians everywhere: “the Indian-chief profile on a Pontiac, the innocent-looking girl on the corn-oil margarine, the hook-nosed cartoon mascot of the Cleveland Indians.”

Taylor's mother, Alice, who joins her in exile, is escaping, too, from a husband whose “idea of marriage is to spray WD-40 on anything that squeaks.” Taylor's boyfriend, Jax, a musician with a band called the Irascible Babies, is left on his own after her sudden departure. His response to her absence—a mixture of comical, philosophical acceptance and pure yearning—makes him one of the most appealing characters in recent fiction. And Barbie, a waitress obsessed with the doll for whom she's named herself (including the trademark symbol), is one of the funniest.

Even quiet Turtle is indelibly rendered, especially by those buried memories of abuse that begin to surface whenever her current security is threatened: “Somewhere else in the old place was that shine of angels or stars too close, the underwater, shoes on the floor and no light and a man's voice across your mouth and you can't get air.”

Things are resolved rather neatly at the end of Pigs in Heaven, but that seems less a literary copout than a model for diplomatic negotiations. One feels that the characters of Pigs in Heaven are lucky to be living inside Barbara Kingsolver's head and that her readers are lucky to be able to visit there for a while, too.

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