[In the following essay, Ryan provides an overview of the major themes and critical reception of Kingsolver's novels. According to Ryan, Kingsolver's “aggressively politically correct” fiction is undermined by elements of sentimentality and implicit reversions to traditional values.]

The world of contemporary American fiction must be a bewildering circus for many readers, though sales figures indicate that we're buying tickets at a record rate. Venues range from the intimate neighborhood bookshop where the owner knows your tastes and puts aside a choice new morsel that she's sure you'll love, to the new discount book megamarkets that always stock 5,000 copies of Danielle Steel's latest, at 25٪ off. The reading choices—just in contemporary American fiction—are staggering: mysteries—hundreds of mysteries; Stephen King and the other scary guys; sexy vampires; countless romances; as well as the latest from Robertson Davies and William Gass, and (always) Joyce Carol Oates. Serious; popular; experimental; postmodern. It's an exciting time to be a reader. But how does one know what to buy?

Somehow a great many readers have learned to choose the fiction of Barbara Kingsolver. Kingsolver's novels and short stories—The Bean Trees, 1988; Homeland and Other Stories, 1989; Animal Dreams, 1990; and Pigs in Heaven, 1993—are commercial and critical successes, books that enjoy numerous, almost invariably glowing reviews that attest to their status as serious literature, even as they sell impressively at all those bookstores.

Kingsolver's work (and here I will concentrate on her three novels) consistently floats among the verbiage that vies for our dwindling reading time. Her novels and stories are seductively appealing, offering, as they do, sympathetic, interesting characters; well-paced plots with clear resolutions; and a breezy, colloquial, eminently readable style. That is to say, they give us all the comforting conventions of old-time realistic fiction, flavored with the cool contemporary lingo favored by so many of the truly hip young guns. In short, Barbara Kingsolver's novels and stories are a good read. But I would argue that more importantly—and distressingly—Kingsolver's fiction is so very popular because it is the exemplary fiction for our age: aggressively politically correct, yet fundamentally conservative.

Kingsolver knows what she's about. In the battle that rages in literary magazines for the elusive soul of contemporary American fiction, she unabashedly proclaims herself to be “old-fashioned.” It's a popular position: on the attack against so-called minimalist writing and in defense of his very popular behemoth, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe in 1989 bemoaned what he perceived to be the sterility and social irresponsibility of contemporary American fiction and called for a return to the “big, rich” social novel of Dickens and Steinbeck.

Reviewers of Barbara Kingsolver's work perhaps inadvertently betray their sympathies with the call for a return to traditional realistic fiction, generally welcoming her mobilization of political themes and her dissimilarity to the ostensibly clever, narrow, MFA-burdened writers—the Absurdists and Neo-Fabulists and Minimalists—that Wolfe and so many others decry. Karen FitzGerald, for instance, finds The Bean Trees to be “refreshingly free of cant and the self-absorption of … overrated urbane young novelists” (28). Diane Manuel applauds The Bean Trees for giving readers “something that's increasingly hard to find today—a character to believe in and laugh with and admire” (20). Margaret Randall likes the novel because “it is one of those old-fashioned stories, thankfully coming back onto our literary scene, in which there are heroines and anti-heroines … ordinary humans [who] go places and do things and where they go and what they do makes sense for them … and for us” (3). Russell Banks detects in the characters of Homeland “a moral toughness … a determination to find value and make meaning in a world where value and meaning have all but disappeared” (16). Karen Karbo, in her New York Times Book Review review of Pigs in Heaven, maintains that Kingsolver's “resounding achievement” is that “she somehow manages to maintain her political views without sacrificing the complexity of her characters' predicaments” (9).

Kingsolver herself makes clear that her commitment to tackle the social issues of our day is conscious—and central to her undertaking. “I only feel it's worth writing a book if I have something important to say,” she asserted in a 1989 interview. And she, like Wolfe, dismisses the fashions of contemporary fiction, claiming that she sees “a lot of beautifully written work that's about—it seems to me—nothing” (Contemporary Authors 287). One of the generation that came of age in the 1960s, and consequently believes that “we can make a difference in the world,” Kingsolver too laments the “divorce” between “politics and art” in our culture. (Farrell 29). “I am horribly out of fashion,” she boasts. “I want to change the world. … I believe fiction is an extraordinary tool for creating empathy and compassion” (Contemporary Literary Criticism 68). Kingsolver wrestles the beasts of contemporary society: child abuse, labor unrest, political repression, feminism, the disintegration of Native American culture, and environmentalism. But she proffers her medicine sprinkled with Nutrasweet. This is fiction for everyone. “I have a commitment to accessibility,” she asserts. “I believe in plot. I want an English professor to understand the symbolism while at the same time I want one of my relatives—who's never read anything but the Sears catalogue—to read my books” (Publishers Weekly 47). In fact, Barbara Kingsolver's books do appeal to both the literary scholar and the Sears shopper. And why not? The problem is that for all their apparent attention to the pressing social problems of our time, Kingsolver's light and lively books—which purport to give us food that's both nourishing and appetizing—leave all of us feeling just a bit too fine.

Kingsolver's critically acclaimed first novel, The Bean Trees, introduced the elements of her fictional world, which she develops in the recent sequel, Pigs in Heaven. When plucky, ingenuous Taylor Greer leaves Kentucky and “lights out for the territory” at the beginning of The Bean Trees, she sets out on a physical and spiritual journey that thrusts her into a world fraught with danger, evil, and the unexpected. In Oklahoma, enroute to Tucson, Taylor has found herself entrusted with the care of a silent, abused three-year-old Native American child who clings to Taylor with such ferocity that she christens the girl “Turtle.” Like it or not, Taylor becomes an instant mother, a “bewildered Madonna,” with a new understanding of the hazards of contemporary life (The Bean Trees 75). An afternoon at the zoo promises “stories of elephants going berzerk and trampling their keepers; of children's little hands snapped off and swallowed whole by who knows what seemingly innocent animal” (The Bean Trees 124). Taylor wonders “how many … things were lurking around waiting to take a child's life when you weren't paying attention” (The Bean Trees 45).

Of course, the trip to the zoo is a pleasant afternoon in the park, but there are real dangers in the world that Taylor encounters in her new life. When she first bathes Turtle and discovers the child's “bruises and worse,” Taylor acknowledges that “I thought I knew about every ugly thing that one person does to another, but I had never even thought about such things being done to a baby girl” (The Bean Trees 23).

The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven are Taylor's story, and they present Taylor's education into the perplexities of contemporary society, as she ventures out of her small, rural Kentucky hometown into a heterogeneous, confusing world. But Taylor's lessons are finally less of the hazards and atrocities of the world than they are about its consolations and strategies for survival. For despite the peril and attendant vulnerability that pervade these characters' lives, real danger is displaced and diffused by the characters' resilience and the inherent goodness of the world. The indifferent aunt who abused, then abandoned Turtle is, for example, only a fleeting, fading presence in The Bean Trees (just as Barbie, the amoral waitress in Pigs in Heaven, is written out of the novel before she can do much damage). And Taylor, whose commitment to and competence at motherhood develops throughout both novels, puts her worried friend Lou Ann's anxieties into proper perspective: “The flip side of worrying too much is just not caring. … If anything, Lou Ann, you're just too good of a mother” (The Bean Trees 156).

The threats of everyday life are less obvious in Pigs in Heaven, but here, two years later, Taylor confronts her most threatening crisis when Annawake Fourkiller, an earnest young attorney who works for the Cherokee Nation Headquarters, learns of Turtle and her bogus adoption and resolves to return Turtle to her family and her heritage. Years earlier, Annawake lost a twin brother to the racist social system that allowed Native American children to be removed from their reservations and placed in the care of white families, and she intends to see to it that Turtle is returned to her home.

The plot of Pigs in Heaven discloses Taylor's attempts to flee with Turtle, then finally her compromise with Annawake and the Cherokee nation that will allow her to remain Turtle's mother while immersing the child in the culture that claims her. Annawake, for all her righteous insistence that Turtle belongs with her nuclear and Indian families, since only they can “tell that little girl who she is,” is feminized by the force of Taylor's love for Turtle (Pigs in Heaven 68). As her short, spiky hair grows into a “glossy, earlobe-length bob,” Annawake, who experiences a “crisis of faith” about her determination to take Turtle away from Taylor, develops into a caring woman and a skilled negotiator, who proposes an unbelievable plan that will let everyone live happily ever after.

The Cherokee community that welcomes Turtle, Taylor, and her mother Alice in Pigs in Heaven adores and nurtures its children, values its culture, and preserves its myths, all of which “add up more or less to ‘Do right by your people’” (Pigs in Heaven 88). The extended Indian family of Heaven, Oklahoma, is incapable of producing the indifferent aunt and her abusive boyfriend who have abandoned Turtle in the earlier novel; here, they have been replaced by Turtle's grandfather, Cash Stillwater, a sexy, sensitive, communicative man who deserves—and gets—a second chance at happiness.

Taylor and Turtle begin the novel essentially alone, but by the denouement, they have been embraced by an extended family including the perfect grandfather; Taylor's newly-enlivened mother, Alice; and all of Heaven, Oklahoma. In her review of Pigs in Heaven, Sybil Steinberg notes, correctly, that one of the strengths of the novel is Kingsolver's ability to “mak[e] the reader understand and sympathize with” both claimants on Turtle's life—the Cherokee Nation and Taylor (652). It is, therefore, all the more unrealistic—and dishonest—that this disquieting dilemma is resolved so neatly. For once again, hazards and unpleasantness are neatly vanquished by the end of the novel. Over and over, Kingsolver has her characters recognize, grapple with, and finally overcome hazards large and small. Her keen awareness of the tenuousness of contemporary society, its vulnerability to everything from MTV to failing farms, is a theme that runs throughout her fiction. In Pigs in Heaven Alice discards a husband who watches television with “perfect vigilance” because she believes that TV “promises whatever you want, even before you knew you wanted it” (Pigs in Heaven 4, 116).

In Kingsolver's most recent novel, Taylor teaches her daughter how to choose the fastest line in the grocery store: “As a general rule I say go for the oldest. Somebody that went to school in the days when you still learned arithmetic” (Pigs in Heaven 99). Modern life is fragile, changeable, and uncertain. And for Kingsolver, the only antidote for the perilous fragility of our world is the preservation of traditional values and time-honored customs.

In Pigs in Heaven, it's the Native American community that maintains old-fashioned values—polite teenagers, tribal ceremonies, and extended families. When Cash decides to return home from his injudicious journey to Wyoming, he envisions a home “where relatives will always move over to give you a place at the table” (Pigs in Heaven 112). Kingsolver's second novel, Animal Dreams, interjects a Latin American influence into her contraposition of the old world and the new. In her mid-thirties, Codi Noline returns to her childhood home of Grace, Arizona (as pointedly and heavy-handedly named as Heaven, Oklahoma) to come to terms with her ailing, distant father; her miscarried child; her sense of isolation from the community that nurtured her as a motherless child. Codi's sister Hallie is a distant yet compelling presence in the novel, whose letters from Nicaragua, where she is an agricultural adviser to the peasants who resist the U.S.-backed Contras, offer guidance to the aimless Codi.

Grace is a dangerous world, too. The local mining company is poisoning the water and soil and threatening to dam the river altogether, thus cutting off the town from its water supply. A baby chokes on a pinto bean. And Hallie is kidnapped, then murdered, in Nicaragua. But the consolations in the life of old-world Grace are considerable. The women and children still tend the graves of their dead relatives and, on all Souls' Day, festoon the cemetery with chrysanthemums and picnic food. “The unifying principle was that the simplest thing was done with the greatest care,” Codi marvels. “It was a comfort to see this attention lavished on the dead. In these families you would never stop being loved” (Animal Dreams 163).

Each of the protagonists in Kingsolver's novels must come to acknowledge the authority of seasoned customs, which is variously embodied in an appreciation for continuity, a sense of place, and family—values that prevail over danger and instability in their fictional world. Of course, aware as she is of the exigencies of modern life, Kingsolver defines family in the broadest possible terms.

In The Bean Trees, after she hears political refugee Estevan's horrid story of life in Guatemala, Taylor remembers the paper dolls that she played with as a child. She knew then that the “Family of Dolls,” which consisted of Mom, Dad, Sis, and Junior, was an unrealistic dream, and she knows that now; but she can't help thinking that in “a different world” she and Turtle, Estevan and his wife Esperanza, “could have been the Family of Dolls” (The Bean Trees 138). Instead, in this mercurial world, families are composed of any people who come together to care for each other. Taylor and Lou Ann recognize that they and their children are a family; so are their neighbors, blind Edna Poppy and cantankerous Virgie Mae Valentine Parsons. In Pigs in Heaven the Cherokee community of Heaven offers the model for non-traditional families. Identifying her numerous grandchildren to Alice, Cousin Sugar explains that her young grandson is raised by her son Junior though he was born to her daughter Quatie. “She already had six or seven when he was born, so Junior adopted him. You know how people do. Share the kids around” (Pigs in Heaven 223). Annawake challenges Alice's insistence that Taylor has a right to keep Turtle because no one in her family wanted the child. The entire Cherokee nation is Turtle's family, according to Annawake: “We don't think of ourselves as having extended families. We look at you guys and think you have contracted families” (Pigs in Heaven 284).

Perhaps Taylor has always known that a father and mother and 2.3 children don't necessarily make a family, but she has an important lesson to learn about families nonetheless. When the much-loved Turtle innocently tells a social worker that she has no family, Taylor is astonished and hurt, until she figures out that feeling like a family isn't enough; she tells Alice,

She's confused, because I'm confused. I think of Jax and Lou Ann and … of course you, … all those people as my family. But when you never put a name on things, you're accepting that it's okay for people to leave when they feel like it.

They leave anyway, Alice says. My husbands went like houses on fire.

But you don't have to accept it, Taylor insists. That's what your family is, the people you won't let go of for anything. (Pigs in Heaven 328)

Taylor learns what Codi must discover, too; that family—blood or found—must be claimed.

Taylor is right, but so is Alice. Men do leave in Kingsolver's world; and in fact, her protagonists are nearly always women, women confronting the vicissitudes of being women in late twentieth-century America. Kingsolver's feminism is unassailable. Writing about her failure to appreciate the current men's movement, she notes that “women are fighting for their lives, and men are looking for some peace of mind. … The men's movement and the women's movement aren't salt and pepper; they are hangnail and hand grenade” (“His-and-Hers Politics” 70). Kingsolver's novels are set in an unpredictable, baffling, imperfect world that is always a women's world.

It's not that men are cruel or boorish in The Bean Trees; they're simply irrelevant. Taylor's father is “long gone,” and Taylor suspects that she's all the better for his absence (The Bean Trees 2). Lou Ann's husband slides quietly out of her life, and the novel, as Taylor pulls into Tucson. His absence doesn't matter much either; Lou Ann listens to him packing up his belongings and notices that “his presence was different from the feeling of women filling up the house. He could be there, or not, and it hardly made any difference” (The Bean Trees 63).

Taylor has spent her life avoiding the likely prospect for a girl like her in Kentucky, getting “hogtied to a future as a tobacco farmer's wife.” She knows that “barefoot and pregnant” is not her style (The Bean Trees 3). And her (and the novel's) attitude toward men is best articulated by the Valentine's card she sends her mother: “On the cover there were hearts and it said, ‘Here's hoping you'll soon have something big and strong around the house to open those tight jar lids.’ Inside was a picture of a pipe wrench” (The Bean Trees 82).

The perspective on men changes in Pigs in Heaven. Alice, who on the first page of the novel walks out on her taciturn second husband because “his idea of marriage is to spray WD-40 on anything that squeaks,” discovers life, when she ventures to Heaven to help her daughter, and love, when she meets Cash Stillwater, a Robert James Waller dream of the perfect aging man (Pigs in Heaven 3). And Taylor, who throughout the novel is unable to commit to her quirky, rock-n-roll boyfriend, Jax, decides (rather inexplicably) by the end that she wants “to start thinking of me and Jax as kind of more permanent” (Pigs in Heaven 327).

There is a place for men in the family-driven world of Pigs in Heaven, but here, too, it is women who can be counted on, women who endure, “Isn't that the dumbest thing, how the wife ends up getting filed under the husband?” Alice asks, as she struggles to contact her long-lost cousin in Oklahoma. She knows that “the husband is not the most reliable thing for your friends to try and keep track of” (Pigs in Heaven 182).

Grace, Arizona, the setting of Kingsolver's second novel, Animal Dreams, is a matriarchal community dominated, and finally preserved, by the elderly Mexican-American women of the Stitch and Bitch Club. When the community's very survival is threatened by the mining company that has long controlled the town, as the men squabble about lawsuits and get sidetracked by football games on television, the women mobilize a clever, and successful, campaign against big business. And Kingsolver's protagonist, Codi Noline, who has just returned after fourteen years to the community in which she always felt like an outsider, gradually comes to understand that those same women, twenty years before, were “fifty mothers who'd been standing at the edges of my childhood, ready to make whatever contribution was needed at the time” (Animal Dreams 328).

Kingsolver's is a world, not simply of women, but, significantly, of women and children, mothers and children. When Taylor steers her '55 Volkswagen west at the beginning of The Bean Trees, she leaves behind her beloved Mama (the Alice who discovers her independence, acquires her own name, and becomes an important character in Pigs in Heaven). Mama has struggled to raise Taylor alone, and has always let her daughter know that “trading Foster [Taylor's father] for [her] was the best deal this side of the Jackson Purchase” (The Bean Trees 5). All of the women in The Bean Trees raise children alone; in fact, child-rearing and marriage seem mutually exclusive.

Apparently, the newly domesticated men, Jax and Cash, will help to raise Turtle in her life after Pigs in Heaven, but this novel, too, is adamant about the sanctity of motherhood. Annawake's male law partner is less certain than she that Turtle should be wrested away from Taylor; and Annawake accepts his suspicion that she cannot understand Taylor's feelings about her daughter because “she isn't a mother” (Pigs in Heaven 67). Alice, reunited with Taylor, notices that her daughter is wearing pink, a color that the exuberant Taylor has always disliked. And Alice knows then that Taylor is truly Turtle's mother, since “she has changed in this way that motherhood changes you, so that you forget you ever had time for small things like despising the color pink” (Pigs in Heaven 138).

Motherhood—and its concomitant values: family, community, sacrifice, caring—are sacrosanct in Kingsolver's world. In the “different world” that she envisions throughout her fiction, we'd all care for everyone's child; in our world, exhausted, selfless mothers get the nod—and the approbation. Indeed, Kingsolver's apparent appreciation for non-traditional families is compromised by her unrelenting admiration for mothers. And though undoubtedly she means to suggest a vision for improving society; in fact, her privileging of family values works to compromise her message about the injustices of our society, which finally just don't seem all that ominous.

Barbara Kingsolver wants to say something important in her fiction about contemporary society and our responsibility to try to make the world a better place. She wants to challenge us to confront and do something about child abuse, the Native American Trail of Tears, and the American-backed crimes in Central America. Finally, she wants to tell us (through Hallie) that though “wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run[,] [t]he daily work … goes on, it adds up. … Good things don't get lost” (Animal Dreams 299). Hers is a considerable and admirable undertaking. As Jack Butler writes in his review of The Bean Trees, “who can be against the things this book is against? Who can help admiring the things this book is for?” (15). “But,” Butler continues, “reality suffers. … At one point late in the book, Turtle experiences a frightening reminder of her early horrors, and much is made of the damage this sort of recurrence can do—but then the subject is dismissed” (15). The problem with Barbara Kingsolver's fiction is that the big subjects, the looming dangers, are always dismissed. Everyone in her books turns out to be inherently good and well-meaning; the men sensitive and sexy, the women intrepid and resilient (and always perfect mothers). Karen Karbo raves about Pigs in Heaven in her review, but she unconsciously articulates the unease that Kingsolver's books inspire. “Her medicine is meant for the head, the heart, and the soul—and it goes down dangerously, blissfully, easily” (9). The dangers in Kingsolver's novels are not the challenges and perils that her characters all too easily overcome; they are the soothing strains of that old-time religion, lulling us into oblivion with her deceptive insistence that if we love our children and our mothers, and hang in there with hearth and home, the big bad world will simply go away.

It's a seductive, seditious message. We get to feel good about ourselves for crying over Turtle's scars and Hallie's murder, and we end up like Annawake, who settles herself sentimentally under her three quilts, “remembering from her childhood the noisy aunts who made [them]; they lived in one house, and could never agree on anything in this world except that love is eternal” (Pigs in Heaven 179).

The conventions of traditional realistic fiction that Wolfe and Kingsolver's reviewers miss in so much contemporary writing are the meat of Barbara Kingsolver's writing, which she serves with a soupçon of sentimentality for seasoning; and for dessert, the funny, slick patois of so much of that very hip recent fiction. She even gives us a healthily helping of vegetables: we may not like learning of Nicaraguan Contras and child abuse, but we know it's good for us. Finally, however, Kingsolver's work is contemporary American fiction lite. It's what we're supposed to eat these days, and it's even fairly tasty, but it's not very nourishing—and we go away hungry.

Works Cited

Banks, Russell. “Distant as a Cherokee Childhood.” Rev. of Homeland and Other Stories. Barbara Kingsolver. New York Times Book Review. 11 Jun 1989: 16.

“Barbara Kingsolver.” Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 55: 64-68.

Butler, Jack. “She Hung the Moon and Plugged In All the Stars.” Rev. of The Bean Trees. Barbara Kingsolver. New York Times Book Review. 10 Apr. 1988: 15.

Farrell, Michael J. “In Life, Art, Writer Plumbs Politics of Hope.” National Catholic Reporter. 22 May 1992: 21, 29-30.

FitzGerald, Karen. “A Major New Talent.” Rev. of The Bean Trees. Barbara Kingsolver. Ms. Apr. 1988: 28.

Karbo, Karen. “And Baby Makes Two.” Pigs in Heaven. Barbara Kingsolver. New York Times Book Review. 27 June 1993: 9.

Kingsolver, Barbara. Animal Dreams. NY: HarperCollins, 1990.

———. The Bean Trees. 1988 NY: HarperPerennial-Harper & Row, 1992.

———. Homeland and Other Stories. 1989 London: Virago, 1990.

———. “His-and-Hers Politics.” Utne Reader Jan.-Feb. 1993: 70-71.

———. Interview. Contemporary Authors. Vol. 134: 284-89.

———. Interview. Publishers Weekly. Lisa Lee. 31 Aug. 1990: 46-47.

———. Pigs in Heaven. NY: HarperCollins, 1993.

Manuel, Diane. “A Roundup of First Novels about Coming of Age.” Rev. of The Bean Trees. Barbara Kingsolver. Christian Science Monitor. 22 Apr. 1988: 20.

Randall, Margaret. “Human Comedy.” Rev. of The Bean Trees. Barbara Kingsolver. Women's Review of Books. May 1988: 1, 3.

Steinberg, Sybil S. Rev. of Pigs in Heaven. Barbara Kingsolver. Publishers Weekly. 5 Apr. 1993: 62.

Wolfe, Tom. “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast.” Harper's Nov. 1989: 45-56.