One book (among many waiting to be read)

Reading this week was lighthearted.  I got started on a book, misplaced it, picked up another, and as I sorted through the piles of book on the living room floor, kept coming across book after book that I had meant to read by never gotten to.  It was time to stop and read something now rather than just continuing to pile things up for the future.

I stared with The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver and found it surprisingly enjoyable.  It was surprising because the only other novel by the author I have read was The Poisonwood Bible, and although that book has stayed with me and had a great affect on me, I did not find it particularly enjoyable.  Maddening yes.  Enlightening yes.  Poignant yes.  Enjoyable, most definitely not.

But back to The Bean Trees.  Kingsolver has a remarkably astute way of capturing an image or dialog or a moment of drama, making it poignantly real, and even though there are many events and many characters in this book, and even though some of them are not developed beyond being symbolic "types", she manages to weave all the threads and all the bits and pieces into a harmonious whole where every detail fits.  She writes a novel with a poet's sensitivity to language and to structure and that is not an easy task for either a poet or a novelist.

That said, I thought the beginning was stronger than the ending.  The narrator, Taylor Greer, is a dynamic and vividly drawn character who draws the reader in.  But then as the plot becomes more complex and more things happen to Taylor, she seems to become more vague, too much of a symbol of what the author wants to portray and less of a person in her own right.  Despite this, I remained vested in the plot, probably because the plot became stronger even as Taylor's individuality seemed to fade.  I worried about Turtle, the little girl who eventually became Taylor's own, and I followed Taylor as she grew up and accepted the one thing she never wanted (a child) and went from being a smart, engaging young adult, to a resourceful, caring woman.  But I no longer cared as deeply as I might have and although the book remained enjoyable, it fell short of being enlightening or moving.

To reiterate, we start the novel with a strong engaging female lead, and we lose her somewhere along the path, even though the novel is very much about her growth into adulthood.  Taylor Greer seems to become just another symbol who reacts to situations as needed to fit the author's goals, but there is no longer any sense of Taylor as a person making these choices, something that is mourned simply because Taylor started out so very very real. This is one of the problems I had with The Poisonwood Bible as well, that too many of the characters were unrealized shadows that were drawn with large brush-strokes dipped far too heavily in the ink of stereotype.  In that later novel, however, Kingsolver does manage to maintain the richness of her portrayal of the characters that seem dearest to her heart.  In this early novel, she seems to lose the person in the pursuit of the idea.

The ideas set forth in this book are good ideas. Even as Taylor fades, the plot seems to become stronger and clearer although perhaps a little too certain.  In this world, terrible realities do surface, but then they fade back below the surface if they cannot be handily resolved, a kind of selective awareness that all humans actually must practice in order to survive, but in this book, perhaps the answers seem to pat, too simple, achieved to easily to be quite real.

Still it was a good novel and better than most with excellent writing and several interesting subplots revolving around language: how language defines identity and the various ways it affects political and sociological reality, and most importantly how the child, Turtle, picks up the mantle of language, beginning with the naming of things, particularly vegetables, and yes, beans, and how these words paint a portrait of Turtle's past and future.  Very interesting.