Barbara Kingsolver's Lowfat Fiction:

The world of contemporary American fiction must be a bewildering circus for many readers, though sales figures indicate that we're buying tickets at a record rate. Venues range from the intimate neighborhood bookshop where the owner knows your tastes and puts aside a choice new morsel that she's sure you'll love, to the new discount book megamarkets that always stock 5,000 copies of Danielle Steel's latest, at 25% off. The reading choices--just in contemporary American fiction--are staggering: mysteries--hundreds of mysteries; Stephen King and the other scary guys: sexy vampires; countless romances; as well as the latest from Robertson Davies and William Gass, and (always) Joyce Carol Oates. Serious; popular; experimental; postmodern. It's an exciting time to be a reader. But how does one know what to buy? Somehow a great many readers have learned to choose the fiction of Barbara Kingsolver. Kingsolver's novels and short stories--The Bean Trees, 1988; Homeland and Other Stories, 1989; Animal Dreams, 1990; and Pigs in Heaven, 1993--are commercial and critical successes, books that enjoy numerous, almost invariably glowing reviews that attest to their status as serious literature, even as they sell impressively at all those bookstores. Kingsolver's work (and here I will concentrate on her three novels) consistently floats among the verbiage that vies for our dwindling reading time. Her novels and stories are seductively appealing, offering, as they do, sympathetic, interesting characters; well-paced plots with clear resolutions; and a breezy, colloquial, eminently readable style. That is to say, they give us all the comforting conventions of old-time realistic fiction, flavored with the cool contemporary lingo favored by so many of the truly hip young guns. In short, Barbara Kingsolver's novels and stories are a good read. But I would argue that more importantly--and distressingly--Kingsolver's fiction is so very popular because it is the exemplary fiction for our age: aggressively politically correct, yet fundamentally conservative. Kingsolver knows what she's about. In the battle that rages in literary magazines for the elusive soul of contemporary American fiction, she unabashedly proclaims herself to be "old-fashioned." It's a popular position: on the attack against so-called minimalist writing and in defense of his very popular behemoth, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe in 1989 bemoaned what he perceived to be the sterility and social irresponsibility of contemporary American fiction and called for a return to the "big, rich" social novel of Dickens and Steinbeck. Reviewers of Barbara Kingsolver's work perhaps inadvertently betray their sympathies with the call for a return to traditional realistic fiction, generally welcoming her mobilization of political themes and her dissimilarity to the ostensibly clever, narrow, MFA-burdened writers--the Absurdists and Neo-Fabulists and Minimalists--that Wolfe and so many others decry. Karen FitzGerald, for instance, finds The Bean Trees to be "refreshingly free of cant and the self-absorption of...overrated urbane young novelists" (28). Diane Manuel applauds The Bean Trees for giving readers "something that's increasingly hard to find today--a character to believe in and laugh with and admire" (20). Margaret Randall likes the novel because "it is one of those old-fashioned stories, thankfully coming back onto our literary scene, in which there are heroines and anti-heroines...ordinary humans who go places and do things and where they go and what they do makes sense for them...and for us" (3). Russell Banks detects in the characters of Homeland "a moral toughness...a determination to find value and make meaning in a world where value and meaning have all but disappeared" (16). Karen Karbo, in her New York Times Book Review review of Pigs in Heaven, maintains that Kingsolver's "resounding achievement" is that "she somehow manages to maintain her political views without sacrificing the complexity of her characters' predicaments" (9). …