Kingsolver of all Media
GAVORA, JESSICA
Books Kingsolver of All Media By Jessica Gavora In 1991, as the novelist Barbara Kingsolver marched outside the Tucson federal building to protest America's involvement in the Persian Gulf war, a...
...Love it or leave it' is a coward's slogan," she told The NewsHour with Jim, Lehrer recently...
...Our old ones, grounded as they are in the glorification of the individual, have accomplished their objective...
...High Tide's success, she told the Arizona Republic, "gives me faith that this so-called mandate, this right-wing revival that's doing such horrible things in this country, maybe isn't so all-inclusive...
...Foremost among these is the American dream...
...Like devotees of daytime soap stars, Kingsolver's fans identify her with her fictional heroines: She is their girlfriend, their confidant...
...Her villains are distant, ubiquitous forces-corporations intent on exploiting workers and raping the land, or governments bent on oppressing the working class...
...Jessica Gavora is director of programs at the New Citizenship Project in Washington, D.C...
...She has a long list of grievances- everything from the Contras to private property-but she reserves special ire for the "information industry...
...the aim of the novels is to (as they say) bring us together...
...And if Kingsolver the novelist is a gentle allegorist, Kingsolver the essayist is a screechy polemicist...
...Her politics are consciously inclusive...
...Kingsolver looks at America and sees a nation in need of a new set of national stories-and she'd like to be the one to write them...
...Particularly vulnerable to this trap are single women, especially single mothers...
...Kingsolver herself has become the object of literary cult worship among a multiplying sect of young, white, mostly female readers...
...The notion that anybody can make it in America with a little brains and a lot of hard work "allows us to perpetuate this huge gulf between the well-off and the desperately poor...
...Gulf war crimes even as they eagerly embrace O.J.'s musings from jail, Kingsolver takes her role in the information industry very seriously...
...It's not that her novels aren't political-they're full of descriptions of the rapaciousness of Western culture, paeans to Mother Earth, and some not-so-subtle disparagements of men...
...And you, dear reader, must remember to do your part by always voting to increase taxes and school spending...
...Kingsolver's characters are not crusaders but ordinary people made heroes because they battle forces larger than they...
...I think a more honorable slogan is 'Love it and stay,' 'Love it and get it right.'" Or, perhaps, her third choice: "'Love it and never shut up.'" Although she promises to return to fiction, High Tide in Tucson is selling faster than Kingsolver's novels...
...Maybe, but until her message takes hold, Kingsolver's fidelity to her native land appears to be tenuous...
...The man in the pickup truck outside the federal building in Tucson taught her a valuable lesson...
...Books Kingsolver of All Media By Jessica Gavora In 1991, as the novelist Barbara Kingsolver marched outside the Tucson federal building to protest America's involvement in the Persian Gulf war, a man sped by in a pickup truck and screamed, "Hey Bitch, love it or leave it...
...She packs their customers in at her frequent signings and readings, spending time to talk with fans and linger over autographs...
...Kingsolver, whose anti-war animus had already driven her to rip yellow ribbons off car antennas, obliged her heckler...
...Independent booksellers, whose customers tend to be particularly receptive to her multicultural, New Age message, love her...
...The weight of her art has been lifted: She can finally speak her mind...
...She'd like us to sink our teeth into something more nutritious, albeit less tasty...
...Possibly because our heads are too crowded with names like O.J...
...Success seems to have emboldened Barbara Kingsolver...
...The only parent that matters is government, and the current government has produced what she calls an "anti-child political culture...
...If you fall through the cracks you must be stupid or lazy or both...
...federal budget...
...But somewhere along the line, in celebrating the individual, we lost our sense of community...
...The media, she charges, are feeding Americans a steady diet of empty news calories...
...Through art, a woman can give a male reader the unparalleled athletic accomplishment of childbirth, or the annihilation of being raped," she writes in High Tide in Tucson...
...And apparently, Kingsolver feels that, for now at least, America needs her more than Spain does...
...That's a lot of recycled paper...
...but she is cagier in her novels...
...and Tonya...
...But her first rule of writing fiction, she told the Arizona Republic, is that in the U.S...
...Or is she denying the child her cultural heritage and continuing the cultural genocide of white against Native American...
...But what would they think of the unmediated agitprop of the real Kingsolver at Ladies Night Out...
...She decided to return home after the Gulf war, she says, because "I couldn't imagine criticizing only from the distance...
...Still, ask one of them about her self-expatriation during the war, and you're likely to be met with surprise, if not disbelief...
...They gave us the courage we needed to populate the West, conquer the great rivers, and bring the indigenous peoples to heel...
...Her protagonists are all women-single women, mostly-yet they are not man-haters, and they retain their sense of humor...
...In High Tide in Tucson, her first major work of nonfiction, she dispenses with the soft focus she uses in her fiction to blur the sharp edges of her politics...
...She ran off to Spain to ride out what she called the "clamor of war worship" that had taken hold in the States...
...What religion of humankind could bless the travesty of the U.S...
...To do so is to risk the censorship that the American establishment imposes on "cultural workers" who dare to question prevailing national passions...
...And she sees limitless possibilities for enlightening her fellow citizens...
...In interviews publicizing the book, as well as in the essays them-selves, she has become more direct and less artful in packaging her message...
...What's more, Kingsolver has built up her following largely by word-of-mouth, almost entirely outside the "literary-industrial complex...
...The great hoax of the American experiment is that it has legitimized wealth and stigmatized poverty...
...Kingsolver is an unreconstructed leftist...
...Is this a sign that America is ready for Barbara Kingsolver, uncen-sored...
...In her non-fiction, Kingsolver labels the U.S...
...This is a truism that virtually every country has managed to grasp except for the U.S., which she compares unfavorably to Cuba and Slovenia in its treatment of children...
...The artist's maverick responsibility," she writes in a new collection of essays entitled High Tide in Tucson (HarperCollins, 320 pages, $22), "is sometimes to sugar-coat the bitter pill and slip it down our gullet, telling us what we didn't think we wanted to know...
...Few U.S...
...Reconstructing our sense of community for Kingsolver means deconstructing and discarding those old myths...
...Though her politics are radical, her aesthetics are quaintly didactic...
...Above all, she seems relieved...
...If you're earning enough to pay taxes at all, I promise, the school needs those few bucks more than you do," she writes...
...They are hooked on her soft, multicultural tales of strong women in strange circumstances...
...Kingsolver's publisher, HarperCollins, boasts that she has had combined paperback fiction sales of 1.5 million...
...If every man knew both those things, I would expect the world to change tomorrow...
...role in Latin America, for instance...
...It doesn't really matter if Heather has one mommy or two, or whether she has a mommy at all...
...If it takes a village to raise a child," she writes, "our kids are knocking on a lot of doors where nobody seems to be home...
...There, she conveys her message by stealth, layering it under easy, flowing prose, engaging characters, and a biting wit...
...The U.S...
...Once in paperback, her books stay in print and continue to sell...
...How can we haggle over the size of this meager life preserver, while shiploads of money for death sail by unchallenged...
...Unlike the New York publishing houses she berates for turning away Ramsey Clark's accounting of alleged U.S...
...For taxpayers, she is the voice of conscience: "Public debate dickers and rages over our obligation to fund the welfare system-a contribution of about $25 a year from each taxpayer on average, for keeping the poorest among us alive...
...you're not allowed to mix art and politics...
...Why do those dictators' names fail even to ring a bell in most red-blooded American heads...
...If I had to believe that the people in this state and in this country really supported that, I would have to leave...
...Two of them deal with a deep dilemma for the politically correct: Can a single white mother adopt an Indian child, taking her off the reservation and into the white world...
...Since 1988, three of her feel-good, eco-feminist novels- The Bean Trees, Animal Dreams, and Pigs in Heaven-have become bestsellers...
...soldiers in Desert Storm war criminals and baby killers...
...There are no unhappy endings...
...Although Kingsolver writes eloquently of the self-discovery of parenthood, she, like the First Lady, believes that parenting is a communal responsibility...
...Artificially sweetening her bitter political medicine has paid off for Kingsolver...
...citizens are aware that our government has routinely engineered assassinations of democratically elected heads of state in places like Chile and Guatemala, and replaced them with such monstrous confederates as Augusto Pinochet and Castillo Armas," she writes...
...In other words, the flip side of our celebration of Horatio Alger is our demonization of the welfare mother...
...For men, she is the wise post-feminist teacher...
Vol. 1 • February 1996 • No. 22
