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PARTISAN REVIEW
compelling and beautiful way. And it seemed to [her] that was the most
important thing [she] could ever do." All of her wri ting has had, indeed, a
strong motive of concern with disadvantaged Americans, particularly those
living in rural areas in the south and southwest. So, for example, in her sec–
ond novel,
Animal Dreams
(1990), the narrator, Codi, returns to her home
town of Grace, Arizona, a rural community consisting mostly of poor
Hispanics and Native Americans, to help in its struggles for the better life–
a mining company is spilling its liquid wastes onto the town's beautiful fruit
orchards, rapacious conmlercial invaders threaten small business, there is
growing class and racial tension (her boyfriend is a mixed Pueblo-Navajo–
Apache), and in the high school where she teaches the teenage pregnancy
rate is rising. Commitment to the needs of others is illustrated, meanwhil e,
by Codi's sister, who has gone to Nicaragua to aid the struggle against the
contras. What has given special strength and value, however, to all of
Kingsolver's writing since her first remarkable novel,
The Bean Trees (1989),
has been the gift which is the true secret of a
D.
H. Lawrence or
Hemingway-an inspired hold upon the sensational aspects of life. She lets
the reader share her sense of the way men and women feel as well as think,
how the look of things both natural and man-made impinges on awareness.
She has, in addition, the true novelist's ear for natural speech which makes
the dialogue in her books rich and believable.
In the newest, most ambitious, and strangest of her books, she has con–
tinued to rely on personal memory even though her scene is the Belgian
Congo in 1959. She herself went there wi th her parents, both medical and
public health workers, at that time-just as her fictional American mis–
sionary and his wife and daughters arrive in the Congo, naively
uncomprehending, a few months before Patrice Lumumba becomes Prime
Minister of the new Republic and before he is assassinated with the com–
plicity of the Eisenhower CIA. Written in the midst of today's warfare and
turmoil in the region, the novel seems to reflect the optimism felt so
recently with the fall of the infamous Mobutu so long sustained in Zaire
by European and American support, yet ironically suggests the fragility of
that optimism. As though recovering a lost paradise, Kingsolver depicts the
natural beauty of "darkest Africa" where nothing was darker than its
invaders and exploiters from Europe. She describes the unspoiled native
villages she knew in her childhood, and to her own memories she adds
research into modern historical, anthropological, and ecological studies.
But the real subject of this novel is not Africa but America. As with
her previous books,
The Poisonwood Bible
is a study of Americans. It is one
of those novels that belong to a genre invented by Henry James, an "inter–
national novel" that describes the moral adventure of Americans abroad.
Like James's travelers to Europe, Kingsolver's visitors to Africa are given
