Flight Behavior - a novel by Barbara Kingsolver, 2012
Barbara Kingsolver continues to charm and intrigue us with her characters and their rooted lives, people challenged by what they experience in the most familiar places, people called into re-birth through problems bigger than they are and launched into service to the greater good through their daily dealings.
Dellarobia Turnbow of Tennessee's Applachian range is a young mother and wife on a farm shared with her husband's family. Nothing in her life seems to her the result of her own intention, however, and she looks for a change through extramarital relationships...until she encounters the monarch butterflies which have roosted as a colony within her family's farm. Suddenly, she becomes the accidental prophet of the town, then the accidental assistant to sexy scientist Ovid Byron, who takes up residence on the farm in order to study the surprising presence of his beloved monarchs there. And, being a Barbara Kingsolver novel, the reader discovers that Ovid is explaining to us as well as naive Dellarobia what climate change really is and what the presence of the monarchs there really means.
By the end, of course, Dellarobia realizes her true purpose in life and gets on with it. Kingsolver's love stories have to do with the protagonist realizing that we must fall in love with ourselves in order to do any good in the world, and that is just what Dellarobia learns to do. Along the way, we experience surprising turns in several of the supporting characters, we share their discoveries of grief and loss and fulfillment with them, and we can leave the book both enlightened to sobering truths about our world and hopeful commitments about how to live our own lives.
These characters, like real people, reveal that they are more than they seem to be at the book's beginning. Cranky, controlling mother-in-law Hester; distant, blustery father-in-law Bear; eager-to-please kindergartner Preston; sassy best friend Dovey; laconic husband Bear...all begin as simplistic cut-outs to Dellarobia and then flesh out for her and for the reader as the book develops. The characters, the setting, the conflicts within and without provide the reader with a worthwhile experience that lingers .
Albert Camus wrote, “People can think only in images. If you want to be a philosopher, write novels.” Kingsolver is one of my favorite philosophers writing today.
