We have been talking about it as we go along, though. Especially because I didn't like it in the beginning. I found the main character, Kentuckian Taylor Greer, to be too folksy, too country, practically a caricature of a Southerner, with her quaint microstories about characters from her home town. I don't consider mysef a person of rural Southern origins, but I know people like that, have family like that, indeed, have a mom who grew up in a small, segregated farm community in Texas. And I wouldn't call her, or any of them, folksy. So, I think, I took offense and couldn't embrace the first third of the book as Taylor describes growing up a "nutter"--country kids who blackened their hands picking walnuts to earn money for new clothes--in a town trapped in the 1950s, which she miraculously escapes unpregnant in her testy Plymouth. The road soon leads her to Oklahoma and the Cherokee nation that she'd always been told she had "head rights," being a quarter Cherokee.
It is in Oklahoma that she acquires a child, the one thing she had avoided and escaped in Kentucky. An Indian child, who is soon called "Turtle," who she learns has been molested and mistreated, a child who is left--mind you, saved, not abanndoned--in the front seat of her car. The rest of the novel--the part that I savoured--involves Taylor coming to terms with her newfound motherhood and the people she meets in Tucson, where the road finally desposits them when the Plymouth needs two new tires, who form her support community.
The New York Times reviewer Jack Butler, in describing this "Southern novel taken west," analyzes it, in part, as a journey through language: Taylor's folkisms, her and a fellow Kentuckian discovering that they talk alike, Turtle's catatonic silence and eventual acquisition of words, and Guatemalan refugee and English teacher Estevan's perfect English and conscientious awareness of the meanings of language (which he passes on to Taylor). And while I see these strands flowing throughout Kingsolver's book, I don't think it is the main theme. Indeed, motherhood and community--the notion of "it takes a village"--most resonated for me.
It is in the last chapters that the reader finally learns the meaning of the book's title, though there have been references to beans--Turtle's first word--and "bean trees," or wisteria, throughout the story.
The wisteria vines on their own would just barely get by, is how I
explained it to Turtle, but put them together with rhizobia and they make
miracles.
Wisteria vines--which like many of the characters in the book--thrive in poor soil and need a community. It is no surprise that Kingsolver began as a science writer--her descriptions of and integration of science in this novel are entirely readable, even powerful. If Taylor is the wisteria, the first rhizobia of which we are made aware is in the first pages of the novel--her mother, who believes she "plugged in all the stars." When first reading of her mom, I turned to Mama and said that it was Taylor's relationship with her mother that would drive the book, even indirectly. Once Taylor acquires Turtle, she worries constantly about being a mother, about being a good mother, a mother like her own. And I would say that it was the relationship with her own mother that even made Taylor open to trying (and Mama and I had a long talk about whether it was our own good mothers who made us want to try). Indeed, mothers and mothering are central: fellow Kentuckian Lou Ann and her mother and grandmother and her own child; the mothering between Virgie Mae and her friend (was it just me or are they "family"?) Edna who is blind; the lost child of Estevan and his wife Esperanza; Mattie and her mothering of Taylor and the refugees in her sanctuary; the absent (and then presumably dead) mother of Turtle; and of course Taylor. It is Mattie who summarizes motherhood for Taylor:
"You're asking yourself, Can I give this child the best possible upbringing
and keep her out of harm's way her whole life long? The answer is no, you
can't. But nobody else can either. . . . That's why it's the wrong question to
ask, if you're really trying to make a decision."
"So what's the right thing to ask?"
"Do I want to try? Do I think it would be interesting, maybe even
enjoyable in the long run, to share my life with this kid and give her my best
effort and maybe, when all's said and done, end up wth a good friend."
So while Butler didn't like the predictable path he believed the novel took, it was this path--in the end an optimistic one about the hope of motherhood and mothering, of maternal connections, the wisteria with the help of rhizobia thriving in the poor soil--that I so appreciated, perhaps because it resonates so deeply with me. Even if I am nowhere near folksy, I found I had many of the same fears and worries of Taylor, which in the end, made her a character, and this a book, that I really cherish.
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