All sorts of ‘crazy wanting,’ both prosaic and earth-shattering, are shot through the intricate tapestry of Barbara Kingsolver’s majestic and brave new novel, Flight Behavior. Her subject is both intimate and enormous, centered on one woman, one family, one small town no one has ever heard of — until Dellarobia stumbles into a life-altering journey of conscience. How do we live, Kingsolver asks, and with what consequences, as we hurtle toward the abyss in these times of epic planetary transformation? And make no mistake about it, the stakes are that high … The arrival of the butterflies is of enormous consequence to Dellarobia’s town. Some want to exploit it for sightseeing. Some want to sell the woods to pay off a looming debt. As the media exploit their unsophisticated subjects, Dellarobia notices that ‘nobody was asking why the butterflies were here; the big news was just that they were.’
To Dellarobia, the swarms are a warning — go home, don’t cheat — but the devoted of Feathertown see a miracle and want a piece of the action. A Bible class dropout ‘tainted with doubt’ and pining for the college education her teen marriage thwarted, Dellarobia is drawn to science and its practitioners, at odds with her neighbors, who believe weather and its accompanying phenomena to be the Lord’s business … Do global warming and intimations of doomsday tax the storytelling at times? Yes. But they share these pages with smaller-scale, deliciously human moments. Without overreaching she delivers line after line that can be at once beautiful, casual, wry, offbeat. Whether she is describing Dellarobia’s malcontented, ambitious in-laws or the environmentally earnest rubberneckers or Feathertown’s rumpled young preacher, she never employs, as she says of one character, the ‘ordinary tools of contempt.’
The word ‘rapture’ appears on the very first page of Flight Behavior. This is appropriate, for the novel extols the ecstasy of passionate engagement — with people, ideas and the environment … Kingsolver takes us deep inside her smart, appealing protagonist's underprivileged world of free school lunches and soul-sapping secondhand stores. Despite her lack of worldly experience, Dellarobia is acutely aware of her family's Appalachian hillbilly status. Kingsolver highlights social stratifications in often comic scenes … Earnest conversations between Dellarobia and Ovid about the direness of environmental conditions sometimes make us feel as if we've wandered into a sophomore seminar, but it's impressive that Kingsolver doesn't sugarcoat the sobering facts of climate change or the heartbreak of a marriage between two good people who are wrong for each other.
The fate of the monarchs is at the center of Flight Behavior’s narrative; they create, for Dellarobia, a newfound awareness of the world, and also pitch her into existential and metaphysical turmoil. For all Dellarobia’s anguish, however, Flight Behavior too often eschews the psychological in favor of the political. Each twist of the plot—which is mostly a series of near-catastrophes concerning the butterflies—feels designed to convince readers of our planet’s impending doom. This is not a frivolous mission, and there is no reason why a piece of literature cannot also serve a political need. But a subtle hand is required to stitch together literature and politics. Kingsolver’s needle is blunt.
Flight Behaviour is an impressive work. It is complex, elliptical and well-observed. Dellarobia and her kin come over as solid but believable individuals, outlined with respect and balance. Even Cub, her much put-upon simpleton of a husband, and his dreadful, manipulative mother Hester, are ultimately accorded sympathy … It is the issue of climate change that hangs, unspoken, over proceedings and it is left to Ovid Byron to give it resonance. Pestered by a hardened TV journalist to explain the monarchs' strange appearance in the Appalachians, he is outraged when she doubts that global warming is real and suggests that climate change deniers might be right...The diatribe becomes a viral hit on the internet. Thus Kingsolver makes her message clear.
The problem with writing a novel about climate change—and Kingsolver is not the first to attempt it—is that the issue is fundamentally abstract. There is very little one person can do to stop the icebergs from melting. That is not to pronounce against everyone doing their part; it’s simply to say that as a dramatic engine, climate change doesn’t have much of heart … So she stuffs 400 pages with information about monarchs and their habits, stringing them between tales of the disintegrating marriage between Dellarobia and Cub, and her growing affection for Byron, the scientist who’s come to investigate the phenomenon. There are also interstitial comments on the class biases, and pure economics, that are preventing Dellarobia’s extended family from seeing the crisis before them, and acting accordingly. What results is unwieldy and, at times, dense.
Flight Behavior has many of the trappings of a work of literary fiction. A strong female protagonist with a complicated recent past, for example, and extended, dreamy descriptions of a shifting natural landscape. But after just a chapter or two, the novel's true purpose becomes clear — it's a Blue State morality tale about Red State people and Red State thinking … Kingsolver, who was raised in nearby Kentucky, spends much of the 400-plus pages of this book wagging her finger at poor white people. Dellarobia, whose dreams of leaving Feathertown to go to college were thwarted by a teen pregnancy, is her Blue State-thinking stand-in. She's trying to shake loose from the roots of her lethargic culture.
The book’s success stems from Kingsolver’s willingness to stay focused on a conflicted young woman and her faltering marriage, while a strange symptom of the degraded environment overwhelms her remote Tennessee town … Flight Behavior is never dull, but the energy leaks out of the story, which sometimes seems allergic to its own drama. And for a heroine reputed to have a wandering eye, Dellarobia has a remarkably low libido. This may be the saintliest novel ever predicated on the persistent temptation of adultery … Kingsolver has written one of the more thoughtful novels about the scientific, financial and psychological intricacies of climate change. And her ability to put these silent, breathtakingly beautiful butterflies at the center of this calamitous and noisy debate is nothing short of brilliant.
Kingsolver opens Flight Behavior in a frenzy, as Dellarobia Turnbow, a one-time rebel girl with two young children and a husband hopelessly browbeaten by his mother, rushes up a mountain hollow to a tryst with a younger man … Her discovery of the ‘lake of fire’ ushers in change on all fronts. The usually passive Cub stands up in church to say that his wife has had a vision that something major was about to happen on their property, and they shouldn't start logging up there. During the hullabaloo that follows, Dellarobia's image goes viral on the Internet as a mashup ‘butterfly Venus’ … By the end of Flight Behavior, it's clear that Kingsolver's passionate voice and her ability to portray the fragility of the natural world, and why we should care about it, are as strong as ever.
Bright and restless, Dellarobia is painfully dissatisfied with her life but doesn't know what to do about it; she can't even consider leaving her beloved two kids, kindergartener Preston and toddler Cordelia. But she is marching up the mountain behind her house, on the way to meet a man she's been flirting with, when she's stopped in her tracks by a miracle … Flight Behavior deals in large issues, but Kingsolver addresses them on the personal level. In this book, climate change is not just something politicians and pundits argue over, but something that blasts the neighbors' peach orchard and threatens the Turnbows' sheep. Its economic complexities are painfully real.
Dellarobia's discovery launches one heck of a good story full of colorful yet subtle characters. The town's chief pastor, a blessedly likable fellow named Bobby Ogle, declares the insects' visit a divine miracle. An enigmatic entomologist, Ovid Byron, arrives from distant parts to pitch a trailer laboratory in Dellarobia and Cub's back yard, explaining that the monarchs once migrated to Mexico, but have been confused by dire weather there and could be near extinction if the Appalachian winter lingers. Others, including Dellarobia's in-laws, see dollar signs … So captivating is this grand, suspenseful plot and the many subplots rising and falling beneath it that it takes some time before we realize what this story is really about – climate change. Kingsolver's social conscience has fueled all of her novels, but in this one, the issue plays second fiddle to the story, and frankly, that makes for a better book.
Flight Behavior is an intricate story that entwines considerations of faith and faithlessness, inquiry, denial, fear and survival in gorgeously conceived metaphor. Specifically, it is a novel about global climate change and how it comes home to roost in one rural community in the mountains of eastern Tennessee. In the story, it has been a winter of unprecedented weather conditions. It is also the winter of Dellarobia's discontent … Kingsolver juxtaposes science and religion, tradition and deviation, and arrivals and departures, using incisive but sympathetic character development. Even Dellarobia's initially trenchant point of view gradually shifts to having compassion for those whose lives are stunted by economic or educational paucity.
The sight that young wife and mother Dellarobia Turnbow comes upon—millions of monarch butterflies glowing like a ‘lake of fire’ in a sheep pasture owned by her in-laws—is immediately branded a miracle, and promises a lucrative tourist season for the financially beleaguered Turnbows. But the arrival of a research team led by sexy scientist Ovid Byron reveals the troubling truth behind the butterflies’ presence … Spunky Dellarobia is immensely appealing; the caustic view she holds of her husband, in-laws, and neighbors, the self-deprecating repartee she has with her best friend Dovey, and her views about the tedium of motherhood combined with a loving but clear-eyed appraisal of her own children invest the narrative with authenticity and sparkling humor. Kingsolver also animates and never judges the uneducated, superstitious, religiously devout residents of Feathertown.
A young woman discovers her rural Tennessee community has been invaded by monarch butterflies in this effective tear-jerker cum environmental jeremiad from Kingsolver … Dellarobia is heading to her first adulterous tryst when she happens upon a forested valley taken over by a host of brilliant orange butterflies that appear at first like a silent fire. She skips the tryst, but her life changes in unexpected ways.
