TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/092490/0924473.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 3.8 KB | 87 lines

                                                                                BOOKS, Page 87

Call of the Eco-Feminist


By PAUL GRAY

ANIMAL DREAMS
by Barbara Kingsolver
HarperCollins; 342 pages; $21.95


    Though routinely maligned as a decade of swinish greed, the
1980s also produced a kinder, gentler brand of storytelling,
one that might be described as "eco-feminist" fiction. The
central plot of this evolving subgenre has become reasonably
clear. Women, relying on intuition and one another, mobilize
to save the planet, or their immediate neighborhoods, from the
ravages -- war, pollution, racism, etc. -- wrought by white
males. This reformation of human nature usually entails the
adoption of older, often Native American, ways. Ursula K. Le
Guin's Always Coming Home (1985), an immense novel disguised as
an anthropological treatise, contains nearly all the
quintessential elements, but significant contributions to the
new form have also been made by, among others, Louise Erdrich
and Alice Walker.

    Now comes Barbara Kingsolver, whose second novel, Animal
Dreams, is an entertaining distillation of eco-feminist
materials. There is the fragile landscape -- the fictional town
of Grace, Ariz., whose river and Edenic orchards face
extinction by the Black Mountain Mining Co. And there is the
doughty heroine -- Codi Noline, who grew up in Grace and
returns home after 14 years of wanderings to teach at the high
school and look after her father, the town doctor, who seems to
be losing his mind.

    Codi certainly does not imagine herself a heroine when she
arrives in Grace. "I felt emptied-out and singing with echoes,
unrecognizable to myself: that particular feeling like your own
house on the day you move out." Codi believes that the brave
one in the family is her sister Hallie, three years younger,
who has gone to Nicaragua to help peasant farmers. "I'd spent
a long time circling above the clouds, looking for life, while
Hallie was living it."

    But Codi also finds herself busier than she expected. She
meets Loyd Peregrina, half Pueblo, half Apache, whom she had
dated briefly in high school; she never told him of the
pregnancy and miscarriage that followed. Now she and Loyd fall
into an affair that threatens to turn serious, not to say
somber. He drives her about neighboring reservations and takes
her to some ancient Pueblo villages. She begins to see a
difference between inhabiting the land and trying to conquer
it: "To people who think of themselves as God's houseguest,
American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or
stupid. A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no
other day but today."

    Yes, Codi does have her preachy side, not that it seems to
bother Loyd. After she lectures him, he agrees to get rid of
his birds and give up cockfighting. There is enough fun in this
novel, though, to balance its rather hectoring tone. Codi has
a deft way of observing her small, remote hometown, caught
uneasily between past and future. When Halloween arrives, she
notes, "Grace was at an interesting sociological moment: the
teenagers inhaled MTV and all wanted to look like convicted
felons, but at the same time, nobody here was worried yet about
razor blades in apples." And the matriarchs who make up the
town sewing circle, called the Stitch and Bitch Club, are both
amusing and formidable.

    It is these women, with Codi's help, who set out to save the
town from the mining company. Kingsolver introduces other
complications, particularly the fate of Hallie, who has been
captured by the U.S.-supported contras. To say everything is
resolved happily would be misleading, but one hint may be
allowed. Anyone who thinks a giant mining concern is any match
for the Grace Stitch and Bitch Club has a lot to learn about
eco-feminist novels.