[In the following review, Randall offers praise for The Bean Trees.]

Here's a first novel that's fast reading but long-staying. It starts off with the narrator's first-person childhood memories. You think this is great: something for light consumption on the daily commuter train or to be absorbed in the pleasure of a steaming tub. And this is certainly a book that can be read in just those places. But it's not simply another trashy (read: delicious) piece of fiction. You are thoroughly hooked by the time you realize Barbara Kingsolver is addressing and connecting two of our most important issues.

The Bean Trees is about invasion. Invasion, not as it is probed and theorized about by political thinkers, psychologists, or academics. Invasion as it is experienced by middle America. And not middle-class America, but real middle America, the unemployed and underemployed, the people working in fast-food joints or patching tires, Oklahoma Indians, young mothers left by wandering husbands or mothers who never had husbands. In this novel you travel from Kentucky to Arizona and never even have to consider the sophisticated complexities of New York, San Francisco, or Chicago.

The Bean Trees is hilariously funny. You laugh out loud. I literally fell off my chair. You turn the pages and wheeze, empathetically amazed and delighted by the characters who people these pages; by their perceptions of themselves and the world and by the decisions they make for their moral as well as physical survival.

Our heroine, Taylor, makes it through high school with the support of a brave and truly loving mother. She remembers one special teacher, whose chief claim to local fame is that his nails are clean; he becomes her key to a first real job: analyzing blood, urine and feces at the small town hospital. This enables her to save $300 for an old VW: her ticket to the world. She leaves her provincial destiny behind, and hits America's roads.

Pace-wise, or in some of its rhythms, The Bean Trees has something in common with Jack Kerouac's classic On the Road. But its meaning is exactly the opposite. Kingsolver's characters don't opt for dropping out of society; they are desperately trying to survive within its confines. For unexpected yet believable humor, made from the more painful observations of our culture, it takes me back to William Eastlake's Portrait of the Artist with Twenty-Four Horses.

But it would be misleading to compare Kingsolver with either of these male authors. In style and vision, she has written a book all her own, and with a deep female consciousness that feels like bedrock when put up against some of the preachier, more explicitly feminist works. Attempting to define this published-yet-new author, Georgia Cotrell's name comes to mind; Kingsolver's prose style has something in common with Cotrell's use of language in Shoulders. She also shares Cotrell's curiosity about a given (although different) social group, her integrity in shying away from surface judgments when looking at complexities and contradictions, and her explorations of non-traditional families.

Two lines of narrative eventually converge in Kingsolver's novel. There is our heroine, telling her story with the quiet unsophisticated irony of a tough and travelin' Kentucky woman. She leaves home bent on getting herself a new name and decides she'll take the cue from wherever she runs out of gas. “I came pretty close to being named after Homer, Illinois, but kept pushing it. I kept my fingers crossed through Sidney, Sadorus, Cerro Gordo, Decatur, and Blue Mound, and coasted into Taylorville on the fumes. And so I am Taylor Greer,” she announces early in the story.

And there is an alternating-chapter third-person narrative: Lou Ann, also from Kentucky but already a sometime Tucson resident, whose rodeo-riding husband Angel Ruiz loses what sense of self he may once have had when an accident takes one of his legs below the knee. Irritable and dissatisfied, he leaves Lou Ann before their child is born.

Taylor's VW breaks down the first time in Oklahoma where, along with repairs enough to get her on the road again, she acquires a child of her own. An Indian woman presses a silent baby of indeterminate age and origin into her arms. The woman retreats, leaving Taylor no choice but to continue on her way, now the adopted mother of this mystery bundle. The child seems slow in her responses; Taylor dubs her Turtle.

Her VW breaks down definitively in Tucson. From then on, it's Taylor as a sudden mother, trying to make it for two, and Lou Ann with her little Dwayne Ray. The Bean Trees, on one well-fashioned plane, is the story of how these two poverty-level women find one another through want ads and mutual need, how they aid one another by pooling their meager resources and sharing a house, how they help one another go on learning about life and what it means.

The end of the scene in which Taylor and Lou Ann join fortunes is worth repeating. The former has answered a house-to-share ad placed by the latter. “Lou Ann hid her mouth with her hand. ‘What?’ I said. ‘Nothing.’ I could see perfectly well that she was smiling. ‘Come on, what is it?’ ‘It's been so long,’ she said, ‘You talk just like me.’”

These two apparently different women are immensely compatible:

Within ten minutes Lou Ann and I were in the kitchen drinking diet Pepsi and splitting our gussets laughing about homeostasis and bean turds. We had already established that our hometowns in Kentucky were separated by only two counties, and that we had both been to the exact same Bob Seger concert at the Kentucky State Fair my senior year.

Lou Ann has been carefully programmed to ask permission for breathing. Many of us will recognize in her that part of ourselves that has trouble believing we do anything well enough, are ever good enough, belong anywhere—even inside our own skins. Taylor offers Lou Ann a piece of her life-earned philosophy, this one about men:

one time when I was working in this motel one of the toilets leaked and I had to replace the flapper ball. Here's what it said on the package; I kept it till I knew it by heart: “Please Note. Parts are included for all installations, but no installation requires all of the parts.” That's kind of my philosophy about men. I don't think there's an installation out there that could use all of my parts.

This is also the story of Mattie, Mattie of Jesus Is Lord Used Tires, and the occupants of her labyrinth second floor; people like the nervous young priest on the motorcycle, and Estevan and Esperanza, who come and go in the night. After a short stint frying up fast food at Burger Derby, Taylor rebels and goes to work for Mattie, a knowledgeable woman who drinks coffee from a white mug on which hundreds of tiny rabbits are having sex in hundreds of different positions.

Mattie can tell right away that Turtle is a girl. And Taylor begins to learn about Mattie's world:

Mattie's place was always hopping. She was right about people always passing through, and not just customers, either. There was another whole set of people who spoke Spanish and lived with her upstairs for various lengths of time. I asked her about them once, and she asked me something like had I ever heard of a sanctuary. I remembered my gas-station travel brochures. “Sure,” I said. “It's a place they set aside for birds, where nobody's allowed to shoot them.” “That's right. They've got them for people too.” This was all she was inclined to say on the subject.

Nothing more is said at that point. But if we didn't get it when we experienced Taylor's shock at discovering the damage suffered by Turtle's victimized body, by this time we are sure that this is a tale about something more complex than two uniquely ordinary women making their way in the world.

There are endless delightful moments in this book. A typical Kingsolver scene happens when Taylor is introduced to Lou Ann's cat:

“You wouldn't believe what your cat is doing,” I said. “Oh yes, I would,” Lou Ann said. “He's acting like he just went potty, right?” “Right. But he didn't as far as I can see.” “Oh no, he never does. I think he has a split personality. The good cat wakes up and thinks the bad cat has just pooped on the rug.”

As is necessary to any decent novel about ordinary America, fundamentalism as a leitmotif surfaces every once in a while. Taylor hits Oral Roberts country on her trip West, and the knowledge that she can always call 1-800-THE LORD keeps her going through many a near-desperate time. Towards the end of the story, a fully confident Taylor decides more out of nostalgia than anything else to dial the “help” line:

The line rang twice, three times, and then a recording came on. It told me that the Lord helps those that help themselves. Then it said that this was my golden opportunity to help myself and the entire Spiritual Body by making my generous contribution today to the Fountain of Faith missionary fund. If I would please hold the line an operator would be available momentarily to take my pledge. I held the line.

“Thank you for calling,” she said. “Would you like to state your name and address and the amount of your pledge?” “No pledge,” I said. “I just wanted to let you know you've gotten me through some rough times. I always thought, If I really get desperate I can call 1-800-THE LORD. I just wanted to tell you, you have been a Fountain of Faith.”

She didn't know what to make of this. “So you don't wish to make a pledge at this time?” “No,” I said. “Do you want to make a pledge to me at this time? Would you like to send me a hundred dollars, or a hot meal?”

She sounded irritated. “I can't do that ma'am,” she said. “Okay, no problem,” I said. “I don't need it anyway. Especially now. I've got a whole trunkful of pickles and baloney …”

Taylor doesn't read about the brutal sexual abuse of children in a book. She discovers it the first time she bathes Turtle. Her knowledge is confirmed months later when she takes the child to a pediatrician and listens to him tell her the terrified little girl she has imagined is perhaps a year and a half is probably closer to three. Sometimes they just stop growing, he says.

Taylor knows nothing about the wars in Central America, and how the US government promotes those wars and then rejects their victims, until she becomes friends with Estevan and Esperanza and accepts the fact that some people work fast-food or assemble lines, others have used tire shops and sanctuaries.

Two related versions of invasion, the sexual invasion of a child's body and the political invasion of a nation's sovereignty, come together and unfold in this story of ordinary people who understand both realities as they touch their own lives. This is also a story about racism, sexism and dignity. It's a story propelled by a marvelous ear, a fast-moving humor and the powerful undercurrent of human struggle.

Something happens in The Bean Trees. It's one of those old-fashioned stories, thankfully coming back onto our literary scene, in which there are heroines and anti-heroines, heroes and anti-heroes, ordinary humans all. They go places and do things and where they go and what they do makes sense for them.. . and for us. There are surprises in this book. There is adventure. And there is resolution, as believable as it is gratifying.

Barbara Kingsolver, herself a Kentuckian living in Arizona, clearly knows whereof she writes. Her prose is effortless and lovely, her structure easy, her evolutions warm and deeply satisfying. Invasion as metaphor is not new with this novel. It has surfaced over the past several years in poetry and prose by some of our most important women writers. Here it occupies a new territory, that of the commonplace, mostly undramatic, story, told and lived by commonplace people, most of them women.

Trite as it may sound, reading The Bean Trees bolsters my belief in an isolated but essentially generous American people. The system will continue to hype us with words and images that systematically distort our sense of world and self. But as long as we retain the capacity to see and feel, as long as the connections are made in our lives and as long as books like this one are written to help us recreate our common memory, we will be able to leave worthy lives to those coming along behind us.