Prodigal Summer (Barbara Kingsolver) Chapters 8-14

How long should a literary conversation, a single strand of dialog be?  How many paragraphs, how many pages?  Some authors seem to believe they should limit it to a couple of pages.  Others, maybe five to ten pages.  Kingsolver has the ability to make a conversation last for twenty or thirty pages without losing the reader’s attention and interest, or without making it seem “padded” just to add length to a chapter.  Other authors that I have noticed that have done this well are Stephen King and Robert Heinlein.  These long conversations often start out covering one topic and then evolve into something else, each topic being important to the point of the story.

Lusa’s conversation in the barn with Rickie brings about her idea about raising goats; something that wasn’t at all on her mind until Rickie happened to mention that a lot of the locals had goats they would just as soon get rid of.  These extended dialog strands are not easy for a writer to make convincing – sometimes even the best attempts by good writers cause many readers to lose patience with them.  Kingsolver makes these passages an absolute delight to read, giving us the feeling that we are in the room with the characters, listening in on a conversation that we don’t need to contribute to in order to feel like we are a part of it.

Long paragraphs seem headed for extinction for much the same reason.  Pick up your average top-selling page-turner and you’ll often see as many as a dozen indentations per page.  A very strong writer isn’t afraid they’ll lose the reader’s attention with long paragraphs.  Kingsolver excels here, too.  An interesting parallel to this is long, drawn-out scenes in movies.  Quentin Tarantino is famous for exceptionally long dialogs gripping enough to hold us mesmerized for the entire scene.  (“Say ‘what’ one mo’ time!”)  Stanley Kubrick was also unafraid of losing us with his extended scenes.

One of the secondary themes of this work is Man’s Place in Nature.  The letters between Nannie Rawley and Garnett Walker pretty much spell it out, with Nannie writing, ‘Everything alive is connected to every other by fine, invisible threads.  Things you don’t see can help you plenty, and things you try to control will often rear back and bite you … The world is a grand sight more complicated than we like to let on.’  This allusion to the principal of Unintended Consequences, often mentioned in connection with politics and the economy, points to man’s meddling with biology and even genetics.  Both of the correspondents bring religion into it:  ‘If God gave Man all the creatures of this earth to use for his own ends, he also counseled that gluttony is a sin…’  Is Nannie being depicted as the proverbial “tree-hugger” against Garnett’s “reactionary old conservative” as the author’s tactic of hiding behind a character to tell us how she feels, while pretending to be the impartial messenger?  I think it’s pretty clear to anybody by this point in the book which side Barbara Kingsolver takes!

This theme is echoed in the tension between the lovers, Deanna and Eddie: ‘”You said I could ask you a question, and now I’m asking it.”  “What?”  “You know.”  He blinked, but didn’t speak.  Something in his eyes receded from her.  “What brought you down here to the mountains?”  He looked away.  “A Greyhound bus.”  “I have to know this.  Was it the [coyote] bounty hunt?”  He didn’t answer.  “Just say no if the answer is no.  That’s all I want.”  He still said nothing.  “God.”  She let out a slow breath.  “I’m not surprised.  I knew.  But I will never, ever understand who you are.”  “I never asked you to.”’

  

Next Week:  Chapters 15-19
Week 4:  Chapters 20-31