MILLICENT BELL
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country singer also named Bonnie accompanies his cornnutment to a
divorce-this followed by a more serious but permanently on-and-off
affair with Fiona, an outdoor enthusiast and mountain climber. But a
greater distraction suddenly offers itself: Mike is asked to be a replacement
Democratic candidate for the district's congressional seat. Assenting almost
without thinking, he is plunged into a
Primary Colors
scenario as he cam–
paigns with a retinue that includes a wily campaign manager who will do
any lowdown thing to achieve a win. Mike loses in the end-partly because
he gags at one of his manager's dirty gambits, which involves making use
of little Nora as an innocent spy. The election over, Mike accepts the
party's consolation prize of a judgeship.
So the many pages turn, full of incident, amusing dialogue, and small
but vivid visibilities, all giving a sense of the way politics makes itself felt
in local communities and conditions. Mike's accidental re-entry into the
political world in which his father and Joss's had both flourished seems far–
cical. And yet, it offers some mending of his severance from public life. To
Edith and Nora, still trying to sum up their parents, the persisting hope–
fulness of Mike's and Joss's lives seems part of a past time, yet amazes them.
As Edith says in the novel's postscript, twenty years after, they had
led a highly nervous life, over-talkative, over-energized, and over-extend–
ed....Now their bones and skin are frailer, but their terrible exuberance
still shakes them. They haven't ever quite done what they hoped. Oh,
close enough. Nora's probably right that Dad has been a good judge. And
Mom gets her movies in college film festivals and every once in a while
on PBS. So they both keep climbing, shorter and shorter of breath.
Which prompts the reflection that, having kept company with them in this
long novel, seen them through so many inconclusive occasions, the reader
too, may find himselflosing breath as though compelled to climb some hill
without a top.
Now, Barbara Kingsolver is a writer who regards writing itself as polit–
ical action. She has always thought of herself as an activist since the days in
the late seventies when she was a student anti-Vietnam protester at DePauw
University to the moment, in 1983, when she joined the strikers' picket line
at the Phelps Dodge copper mines in Arizona. She began writing as a jour–
nalist, as many writers do, but with a bias in favor of literature as advocacy
that persisted when she began to write fiction. She has related that when
she first read Doris Lessing's
Children cifViolence
novels she "began to under–
stand how a person could write about the problems of the world in a
