It’s very hard to balance strong opinions and good storytelling, I’ve found. Either the characters end up preachy or the plot bends itself into contortions to accommodate the moral. In spite of the risks, I think that Barbara Kingsolver manages the balance very nicely in Flight Behavior. There are a few moments where some of the characters sound as though they’re speechifying a little, but on the whole, Flight Behavior is an intriguing mix of rural journey of self-discovery and environmental crusade. This book is amazing, for so many reasons.
Contemplating adultery, Dellarobbia Turnbow stumbles into a massive flock of monarch butterflies that have redirected their migration to Appalachia rather than southern Mexico. Her family, especially her father-in-law, had planned on using the stand of pines the butterflies have roosted in to help save their sheep ranch by selling the trees to a lumber company. But after Dellarobbia’s husband announces her discovery in church, giving it supernatural overtones, the butterflies become a collision point between the in-laws and the lumber company, tourists, and environmentalists. On top of all this is Dellarobbia’s dissatisfaction with her life. Her husband is cowed by his parents and isn’t an intellectual match for Dellarobbia. Dellarobbia feels unappreciated and suffers from the same sort of malaise that I recognize from Betty Friedan.
All of these conflicts twine around each other over the course of the books. The environmentalists and scientists make it known that the butterflies’ relocation is not just a thing of beauty, but is yet another sign that climate change is deranging the ecosystem’s normal patterns. There’s a chance that the butterflies will freeze to death in the cold Appalachian winter before they can breed the next generation. The Turnbows are behind on their mortgage payments and loans and they’re already poor as it is. In fact, one of my favorite parts of the books illustrates just how little these groups understand each other. Dellarobbia encounters a man distributing pamphlets on how to decrease one’s carbon footprint. As he goes down the list of suggestions, Dellarobbia checks off the many she’s already doing: using thrift shops, repairing instead of discarding, not eating out, handing down clothing, not buying bottled water, etc.
Kingsolver brought it all to a conclusion that I found very satisfying. I won’t going into the details, because a readers needs to stay on tenterhooks about whether the butterflies survive or not and whether the family loses the farm or not. The ending wasn’t forced or crushed under a moral. Neither was the ending overly happy. I’ve always noticed this about Kingsolver’s books. The stories always seem as though they could have happened in life, to people you might actually know. The characters are faced with dilemmas real people actually face and are often forced to compromise in the face of untenable positions. I suspect that, because of this, Kingsolver is one of the few contemporary writers that will actually be read in fifty or more years.